ABSTRACT
In this case study of a single multilingual scholar, a South Korean postdoctoral scholar in Microbiology (named Jihun), the author illustrates the practices adopted by him for generating publishable research articles. Despite personal and communicative vulnerabilities, Jihun was very successful as a researcher. He has published at least three articles in high profile journals as the first author, in addition to other publications where he played important roles. He had also developed an expertise in imaging technology, and was treated by his research team as indispensable for this role. Observations of Jihun in his lab and his writing activities, video recorded interactions with his fellow researchers, and interviews on his academic communication, demonstrate how his perceived limitations became strengths. His grammatical limitations in English opened him to greater collaboration with others, engagement with more diverse communicative resources, and conducive ethical dispositions. He embraced his vulnerabilities and strategically developed alternate research and communicative practices. Though he was told by institutional figures that his grammatical competence in English was limited, he emplaced himself in relevant ecological resources and social networks to think and communicate strategically. The strategies developed in the previous chapters—such as métis, distributed practice, prosthetics as semiotics, and anomalous embodiment—are embedded in this narrative on Jihun’s literacy practices. These constructs emerge as going beyond relevance to the communication of the disabled to characterize the communication of everyone, even highly educated scientific researchers in high-stakes professional contexts.
