Genre Performance and the Discursive Regulation of Value Alignment

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the personal statement, an occluded genre, mediates organizational access and shapes writers’ identities in alignment with institutional ethos. To demonstrate how the personal statement constructs its writers, I employ Vijay Bhatia’s Critical Genre Awareness (CGA), an evaluative framework designed to identify trends in the circulation of discourse within professional settings, to analyze the personal statement of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and the discursive resources that give rise to its production. This investigation includes an analysis of the genre’s text-internal properties, including a Swalesian move step analysis of a corpus of 19 personal statements for the English Teaching Assistantship fellowship and an analysis of the intertextual genres that constitute the application. The text-internal analysis is considered alongside a text-external analysis of the discursive resources that account for the genre’s expression and social action, which includes a close examination of the Fulbright program’s professional practices and culture. Finally, after demonstrating how an organization's discourses regulate social participation through value alignment, I offer a case study illustrating how one college applicant creates a new ‘possible self’ through the act of writing her personal statement for college admissions. Ultimately, this project reveals how personal statement writers’ identities are reconstituted through genre performance, establishing both that and how applicants appeal for organizational inclusion through performing identities and expressing commitments that most align with the social organization's institutional ethos.