Spatial repertoires in the disciplinary communication of international STEM scholars

The overall goal of this special issue is to understand how bi-/multilingual STEM scholars navigate and deploy spatial repertoires for professional communication. The articles present contextualized, empirical cases from various genre contexts: instructional practices, scholarly writing, language proficiency tests, and research group meetings. While all the articles adopt a spatial orientation to understanding STEM communication, the authors draw from diverse theoretical concepts that include chronotope, new materialism, and stance analysis for their data analysis. The analyses to understand these genre-specific contexts broadly combine two approaches: (1) analysis of actual communicative practices; and (2) meta-discursive comments by the professionals on their practices. In analyzing the disciplinary practices, language ideologies, and textual products, the authors use the methodological tools of interaction analysis, document analysis, observation, and interviews. Several articles combine more than one methodological tool in order to capture various aspects of disciplinary communication in the given genre context. The six articles included in this issue were first presented as a colloquium at the annual conferences of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia.