Negotiating tensions around new forms of academic writing

This paper reports on an ESRC funded research project investigating the writing practices of academics across different disciplines at three English universities. Through academics' accounts of their experience with and feelings about the role of digital media in their professional writing, this paper explores the factors that complicate their engagement with new genres of writing. The findings reveal a tension between the values of social media, which see knowledge as user-generated and decentralised, and the forms of knowledge creation that are rewarded in academia.