Dispersing the text: Globalisation, research and writing

Those working in the university in contemporary globalised conditions are now involved in increasingly different and often new ways of producing and disseminating knowledge at a time when generally agreed definitions of what constitutes 'knowledge' and knowledge production is changing radically. This raises questions such as-what then is research and who then is a researcher? Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are significant in relation to different ways of producing knowledge new forms of dissemination. They have enabled a proliferation and diversification of research texts and contributed to an explosion of awareness about research to the extent where to talk of research as a migratory practice is no longer purely figurative. The consequence is that research becomes increasingly a series of little narratives as the crisis of narratives brought about by globalisation results in a questioning of a grand global narrative of research.

In this paper, we will examine the contemporary state of educational research using the notion of the 'dispersal of the text' as a means of foregrounding and theorising the greater possibilities for the communication of research in diverse formats to diverse audiences which has been enabled by globalising processes and the space-time compression upon which ICTs are based. We will consider issues such as:

- authenticity, originality and intellectual property rights
- what it now means for research to be located in the literature
- the very different genres of writing now opened up by space-time compression.