Left to their own devices: ad hoc genres and the design of transmedia narratives

Abstract

In this paper, we apply a writing, activity, and genre research (WAGR) framework to explore how research participants designed complex transmedia narratives during a two-semester experiential learning course that was conducted in concert with a major state museum. We focus here on two specific cases from our larger ethnographic study to illustrate participants' self-directed, adaptive development and use of situated genre ecologies to mediate their work. In doing so, we describe how participants navigate among genres and artifacts within a minimum of three overlapping genre assemblages to design transmedia narratives: (1) the course genre assemblage, (2) their discipline-specific assemblage, and (3) their individual genre ecology. We explore individual genre ecologies in detail, describing how participants frequently incorporated ad hoc genres into their workflow as a way of navigating the expectations and genre norms of broader, overlapping assemblages.