Discourse Community

Discourse Communities
A discourse community consists of a group of people who share interests and work towards their area of interest, be it research lab or a fencing team. Since May 2014, I have been part of the microfluidics lab of the college of engineering. “Our research is primarily in the field of bioMEMS and bioelectronics and enhance the medical industry” (Basu). I believe the microfluidics lab is a discourse community as it satisfies all the objectives that are mentioned in Swale’s definition.

The goal of our lab is to improve the medical field, health care facilities and contribute towards biotechnology. Every member of our lab has an interest in this field and contributes towards

Every student meets up with the professor as well as their lab mates at a scheduled time. Our professor makes it a point that we meet with him every week and discuss the project status. We take down notes and talk about the advancement and future work that is pending for the project. For a group project to be successful, we need to keep our fellow lab mates up to date about the latest discoveries and work we have done and that is usually done through email or dropbox. Hence, our lab satisfies Swales’ second objective, which goes as follows: “A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members”

As a research group, we attend conferences all over The United States where we do conference publications and also our mentor gives talks in the field of multiphase microfluidics and Biosensors. For instance, one of PhD student and the professor published the following conference paper: “[Label-Free] Detection of Proteins by Drop Shape Analysis," (Basu). Another talk he gave was at the 34th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology. These are few out of the many conferences my lab mates have attended. To be a member of our lab, one could be a volunteer, a research assistant, a PhD candidate or even a post-doc. As a result, our lab satisfies objective #3, since it provides information and feedback to the bigger communities that it is part of and membership is achieved in some form or the other and due to the above reasons it should considered as a discourse