Email signatures as generic wriggle rooms: Performing the academic self in online communication

Email is a key communication tool of the academic discourse community and writing emails occupies a significant proportion of academic life. While the pragmatic and intercultural dimensions of emails produced in academic contexts have been explored in detail, little attention has been paid to what appears at the end of emails, that is, the email signature. Institutional email signatures are interesting in many ways. They are not obligatory, yet most academics create and use them routinely. While no rules exist as to what to include in an email signature, some generic and novel conventions seem to be emerging. The purpose of this study is to shed light on academic email signatures as an emerging genre. To this end, we study a corpus of some 300 emails signatures used by academics from social sciences, arts and humanities, and identify their generic structure and functions. Our analysis shows that while some shared practices (a core set of moves and steps) exist across the studied signatures, they are mostly limited to personal identification within the institution. Academics exploit the space to signal their membership and status outside the institution in the wider academic community, and to highlight their research accomplishments, both achieved through a variety of practices and multimodal semiotic resources, some of which conform to the established expectations within the community and some reflect new 'pressures'. Similar to the work of Hyland (2015) on underrepresented academic genres, email signatures are a kind of generic wriggle rooms, which academics use to construct and perform their unique academic self. As with other genres, what is foregrounded in the signature is not simply a mini CV, but a strategic exercise in positioning, proximity and academic self-promotion, which reflects changes and new demands affecting the academic community at large.