UPCEL 2024: Ana E. Sancho-Ortiz approaches knowledge dissemination practices on expert Instagram profiles
Ana E. Sancho-Ortiz presented the current stage of her research at the 5th International UCM Predoctoral Conference on English Linguistics, held at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid on the 23rd-24th January 2024. In her presentation, titled “Knowledge Dissemination on Instagram: Exploring Recontextualization and remediation practices on physiotherapy accounts”, she explained the results of a pilot study on a sample of 30 Instagram posts from two individual expert accounts on physiotherapy. Her findings reflect the surprising prevalence of the verbal mode in this visual-centric social media platform, on the one hand, and the consistent reliance on interactional metadiscourse resources (namely attitude markers and self mentions), on the other. Both features seem to relate to the preoccupation of the account holders to craft a complex, multi-faceted expert identity.
The full abstract of her talk can be consulted as follows:
Knowledge Dissemination on Instagram: Exploring Recontextualization and remediation practices on physiotherapy accounts
The reconceptualisation of science as a collaborative social endeavour has led to the promotion of scientific outreach as an indispensable research principle, prompting the scientific community to seek novel avenues for knowledge dissemination (Kupper et al., 2021). Consequently, leveraging technological advancements, scholars have begun to explore digital platforms as means to render specialised knowledge accessible to diverse audiences (Bondi & Cacchiani, 2016; Puschmann, 2015), resulting in the emergence of an ecology of new scientific and academic digital genres (Luzón & Pérez-Llantada, 2022). The functionality of these digital genres derives from their hypermodal potential, which facilitates originally domain-specific texts to cater for the varying levels of expertise of multiple audiences (Maier & Engberg, 2021).
Taking all this into account, this study delves into the recontextualisation and remediation practices prevalent in Instagram accounts for science dissemination within a field currently arousing a significant social interest: physiotherapy. Most specifically, it constitutes an exploratory work on the –presumably deliberate– exploitation of multimodality as a means for knowledge recontextualisation on two individual accounts selected from the HeatlhInsta Corpus—which I am compiling for my PhD thesis. To this end, adopting a multimodal analytical approach rooted in Kress & Van Leeuwen’s (2021) visual grammar, this study analyses a closed set of 30 posts (15 per account) considering the most recurrent verbal and visual elements identified in the captions and central images of these posts. Some initial findings suggest a notable predominance of the verbal mode over the visual mode which contradicts the original visual-centric norms inherent to the platform. Similarly, it appears that the reliance on conceptual and narrative image-based constructions for the central image of the posts (namely photographs, infographics and videos) responds more closely to the preservation of identity-crafting aspects rather than to informative, disseminating matters.