Markers of identification in Indigenous academic writing: A case study of genre innovation

Abstract

This study contributes to research into genre innovation and scholarship exploring how Indigenous epistemes are disrupting dominant discourses of the academy. Using a case study approach, we investigated 31 research articles produced by Mäori scholars and published in the journal AlterNative between 2006 and 2018. We looked for linguistic features associated with self-positioning and self-identification. We found heightened ambiguous uses of “we”; a prevalence of verbs associated with personal (as opposed to discursive) uses of “I/we”; personal storytelling; and a privileging of Elders’ contributions to the existing state of knowledge. We argue these features reflect and reinforce Indigenous scholars’ social relations with particular communities of practice within and outside of the academy. They are also in keeping with Indigenous knowledge-making practices, protocols, and languages, and signal sites of negotiation and innovation in the research article. We present the implications for rhetorical genre studies and for teaching academic genres.

Dead Reckoning: A Framework for Analyzing Positionality Statements in Ethnographic Research Reporting

“…Form plays as much of a role as substance does in informing readers of research who, in turn, create an impression of the researchers through analyzing features of text (Makmillen & Riedlinger, 2021; Tardy & Matsuda, 2009). As a result, a researcher’s decisions regarding how to write their research and their positionality in it affects how readers view that research.…”

Who are “we”? Examining relational ethos in British Columbia, Canada's COVID-19 public health communication

“…Exclusive "we" sometimes designates an individual speaker as in cases of pluralis maiestatis (the "royal we"e.g., the statement "We are not amused" attributed to Queen Victoria) or pluralis modestiae (author's plural -e.g., in a single-authored research paper, using "we" to refer to the individual author) and sometimes, in a true-plural sense, designates a group that includes the speaker and others, but not the addressee (as in the above example of "we" in public health) [De Cock, 2016]. Thus, the meanings and functions of "we" in English are inherently heterogeneous, ambiguous, and context-dependent [Du Bois, 2012;Makmillen & Riedlinger, 2021;Scheibman, 2014].…”

“…In scholarly writing, authors can use "we" inclusively to index mutual knowledge and construct audience involvement but "we" also may refer exclusively to the author and their potential co-authors or, as noted above, to a single author [Harwood, 2005;De Cock, 2016]. In their study of research articles by Mäori scholars, Makmillen and Riedlinger [2021] have shown how the blurred categories of "we" can extend beyond a basic inclusive/exclusive distinction to include a range of shifting identities and social relations as researchers and community members, thus inviting "multiple identification through ambiguity" [p. 11].…”

Spacious Grammar: Agency and Intention in the Teaching of Research Writing

“…Where most pedagogy implies that language choices are universally available for all who join, this approach allows for a critical separation between recognizing how others use certain language structures-including those that express positionality-and whether one should take up those same structures in one's own writing. For instance, particular aspects of how Indigenous scholars present their positionality emerge from Indigenous protocols and the researcher's relation to community (Makmillen & Riedlinger, 2020;Thieme & Walsh Marr, forthcoming;Younging, 2018). On the one hand, such expressions of positionality are not an instruction for non-Indigenous writers to present themselves in the same way and with the same phrases.…”