I was honored to be selected for inclusion in the 10th Annual NCSU Graduate Research Symposium, which took place on Wednesday, March 25, 2015. I presented a poster based on some ongoing qualitative research I’m doing in relation to the emergent genre of Kickstarter writing. I am also interested in studying crowdfunding writing more broadly; however, I discovered as part of my analysis that there are specific regulated conventions for Kickstarter that don’t necessarily appear in other crowdfunding platforms, such as particular sections and word count restrictions. I draw my use of the terms regularized and regulated from Schryer, Lingard and Spafford (2007).
In addition the regulated elements of Kickstarter, I found several trends that were not specifically mandated by the platform. These trends seemed to be coming from the authors themselves, in what I identified as a regularized action in the genre. My overall argument was that, given these regularized and regulated trends, Kickstarter is becoming a differentiated genre from any antecedent genres, and thus deserves research and pedagogical attention.
Schryer, C. F., Lingard, L., & Spafford, M. (2007). Regularized Practices: Genres, Improvisation, and Identity Formation in Health-Care Professions. In M. Zachry & C. Thralls (Eds.), Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions: Cultural Perspectives on the Regulation of Discourse and Organizations. Amityville, NY: Baywood.