Closing the gap between text and context in academic writing research—An “impossible” task?

This paper revisits ongoing tensions in the relationship between text and context in research into academic writing, paying particular attention to the ways in which context is understood, the effects this has on the textual analysis that is performed, and the consequent readings of a text that might be produced. The data for this paper are texts which reference each other in various ways. The theoretical framework for the paper employs insights from Michael Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics and the performativity work of Judith Butler to illustrate the unresolved and perhaps unresolvable difficulties of closing the gap between text and context in academic writing research.