Three minute thesis presentations: recontextualisation strategies in doctoral research

International audienceThe trend towards the democratisation and sharing of academic research has brought about numerous changes in the type and number of genres researchers have to navigate. One recent addition to the palette of university genres is the Three Minute Thesis presentation (3MT). The primary purpose of this article is to identify the principal features of 3MT presentations and examine the recontextualisation strategies that doctoral students need in order to adapt their research to the non-specialist 3MT audience. Basing our study on a corpus of 30 presentations in the sciences and humanities, our analysis of these recontextualisation strategies is divided into two main categories: a) strategies to tailor the scientific information to the audience's knowledge base, focussing on the rhetorical structure and the explanatory strategies used to make the topic comprehensible, and b) strategies to engage the audience's interest using various personalisation and interactional strategies as well as attention-getting devices such as catchy titles, pictures and jokes. Results suggest that 3MTs possess a very stable cluster of features, with their own rhetorical strategies, register, and overall generic structure. The article ends with a discussion of the impact of some modern societal and media trends on 3MTs