Academic Literacies; Discourse and Epistemology in a Swedish University

Abstract

This article explores the perceptions of active senior researchers from different scientific and scholarly areas about scientific and scholarly writing, specifically that associated with research. The study comprises interviews with 12 researchers in four different faculties at a Swedish university: Arts, Social Sciences, Science and Technology, and Medicine. The article draws on Biglan’s (1973) and Becher’s (1994) four intellectual clusters, i.e. (1) hard pure (natural) science; (2) soft pure (arts and social) sciences; (3) hard applied (engineering) sciences; and (4) soft applied (education) sciences and connects them with Graue’s (2006) four identified writing traditions in academia, of: reporting, interpreting, constituting and praxis. The findings suggest that researchers in the applied sciences see writing as having a mediating and creative function for research while, for pure scientists, writing is based on epistemology that does not attribute a mediating function to language (Wertsch, 1998). The study also indicates that researchers who are active in applied science, e.g. professional education of various kinds, are positioned at the interface between the discipline and individuals as social beings, and that they operate as epistemological boundary crossers for the faculties.