Bronwyn James

Becoming an 'authorised' postgraduate research writer

Within the context of postgraduate research education and training in the higher education sector, drafting might be understood as ‘not quite the final product’ produced by the student who is ‘not yet the final product’ of the university. In this paper, I turn this assumption ‘off centre’ to argue instead that writing and subjectivity are mutually constitutive. The execution of competent writing is, I will suggest, the effect of the repeated performance of a particular academic subjectivity, instantiated in text, over time. The interconnected concepts of the social subject and the relational subject are central to the work of this paper and I draw on Judith Butler’s work on peformativity to rethink the relationship between writing and academic subjectivity. Butler’s subject is an unstable subject rather than a fixed identity category, formed in and through discourse and language. Extrapolating from her work to the context of higher education research writing pedagogy, my task in this paper is to exemplify some of what I will call the intersecting vectors; i.e., the limitations, exclusions, foreclosures and improvisations that work together in complex often unpredictable ways in the production of what and who is recognisable as an intelligible text and a competent research writer.

A research writing tool: Designing an online resource for supervisors and students

Abstract This paper presents and discusses the key findings of a needs analysis, and its impact on the design for an innovative online Research Writing Tool, which aims to facilitate higher degree research writing development in medically related fields. Unlike other resources which target students only, this tool aims to support both supervisors and students to identify student writing needs and to facilitate dialogue, through annotations on successful student thesis excerpts and exemplary supervisor feedback on less successful drafts.