Graham Smart

Biography

After completing a Ph.D. in Education at McGill University’s Centre for the Study and Teaching of Writing, I taught in the U.S. for seven years, five at Purdue University and two at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, before coming to Carleton in 2004. My research and teaching focus on the study of writing in academic and workplace settings as well as on environmental discourse. In my most recent research, I am looking at how arguments are socially constructed within the various discourses comprising the current debate over the reality and implications of global climate change. Prior to starting a professional academic career, I worked for a number of years as an in-house writing consultant and trainer at the Bank of Canada, the country’s central bank. As an insider, I was able to use the Bank of Canada as a research site for an ethnographic study of the role of technology-mediated discourse in the organization’s knowledge-building, policy-making, and public communication. This work was eventually published in the book, Writing the economy: Activity, genre, and technology in the world of banking .

Research Interest

writing in academic and workplace settings genre theory and genre analysis interpretive ethnography environmental discourse