Dr Julia Molinari

Professional biography

My research expertise is in academic writing, language, EAP (English for Academic Purposes), Academic Literacies, sociolinguistics, philosophy, sociology, education, and Artifical Intelligence (specifically, how AI re-present imaginaries of what academic writing is).

I am interested in conducting and supervising research on academic writing and communication practices that seeks to question, disrupt, and re-visit received wisdoms about how and why academic knowledge is communicated in some ways but not others as well as why some forms are more valued than others.

In particular, I welcome proposals that deal with:

• histories, cultures, and traditions of academic communication
• theories and practices of academic writing (and their role in including/excluding different research communities)
• higher education policies and practices, and the role that academic writing plays in maintaining these (e.g. citation practices, metrics, the REF, etc.)
• transformative sociologies and philosophies of academic writing (especially Critical Realism and Academic Literacies)
• academic writing practices and their implications for social justice, equality, inclusion, and diversity
• multimodal and multilingual approaches to academic communication
• creative approaches to academic writing
• performativity, plagiarism, and the ethics surrounding this
• emerging and evolving academic writing pedagogies, and related assessment practices
• open access, the politics and economics of academic publishing, and alternative publishing practices (and how academic writing may be affected by pluralising and democratising knowledge).

In my PhD thesis, I argued that academic writing takes many forms and cannot be reduced to standard templates. Using a critical realist lens, I concluded that what makes writing academic are its emergent socio-academic practices, not its constituent forms. This matters because it allows us to re-imagine and think about academic writing as an evolving practice of possibilities and affordances rather than as a set of static and universal conventions. A version of the thesis is now available as a published Open Access research monograph (Bloomsbury, 2022). My research and scholarship have brought into conversation literatures in the cognate interdisciplinary fields of EAP (English for Academic Purposes), Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics, Education, Philosophy and Sociology. I am trying to understand in what sense academic writings (i.e. how we write and communicate academically) can be understood as 'social and transformative practices' (as foregrounded in Academic Literacies research) with the intention of developing more socially just and inclusive approaches to knowledge. Since the PhD and monograph, I continue to be increasingly fascinated by the philosophy of Critical Realism as a lens through which to make sense of writing as an emergent 'social practice', as opposed to its more reductive framing as a transferable skill that can be learnt once and for all. 

I am keen to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of critical realist philosophies (which, since Roy Bhaskar's seminal under-labouring, have branched into different traditions) in order to further theorise the knowledge-oriented practices involved in academic communication, especially in the context of multimodality, emancipatory and democratising pedagogies, and new technologies, such as AI.

I am also keen to research the relationship between plagiarism and standardised writing and assessment practices.

Coming soon.

Coming soon.

Coming soon.

Coming soon.