Introduction

Abstract

Since Plato and Aristotle, debates concerning the centrality of taxonomy, classification and type to knowledge formations have been conducted across multiple disciplinary fields. Such debates have been accompanied by interrogations of what and how types, categories, varieties, genera, kinds and demarcations appear and operate both enduringly and temporarily in the arts, but also in the sciences and in philosophy. Increasingly, however, an intensification of applications of genre as a coordinating concept, often deriving impetus from so-called rhetorical genre studies models, has taken place in fields such as the social sciences, education studies, law and communications studies. Developments within these diverse fields are in part driven by changes in different political and social approaches to the study of classification, to ‘the order of things’, in Michel Foucault’s phrase (Foucault, 1970, p. xxiv), a characteristic which Carolyn Miller has analysed in terms of the concept of emergence (Miller, 2011).