Writing Research Differently

Book excerpt: Community-university engaged research is one of the most important innovations occurring within higher education today. Yet the scholarly literature remains largely untouched by these profound shifts. To better understand why and what can be done about it, this book focuses its attention on the research article itself: a prestigious, conventionalised form of writing that helps shape what knowledge is, how we know it and for what purposes. This highly original book challenges the notion of the empirical research article as neutral–that it just is. Analysis of a range of texts from the field of engaged research reveals both the dominance of scientific genre conventions and author-led strategies to modify, adapt and resist them. In the final chapters, a re-imagined research article is proposed. While speculative, this is an important undertaking, offered as critical and practical encouragement for a form of scholarly communication in which social and cognitive justice is not just acknowledged, but is present.