This book presents a collection of thematically focused articles addressing culture-specific features of academic communication, with a particular focus on communication conducted in English as an Additional Language and directed at multicultural audiences. It comprises papers arranged in four sections: Expert writers, Novice writers and readers, Conference participants, and Non-research academic genres. The book explicitly addresses and is centred upon the concept of a research niche understood as a space to be captured and populated, as a temporary location to move or grow out of in the course of individual professional development from novice to expert, and as a space to consciously reach beyond, delimited by one's linguistic, cultural, educational, and geopolitical background. Here the niche is approached as a frame of reference for discussion of what is culture-bound, culture-sensitive, and culture-free in the academic community and its practices.

The essay addresses one of the main challenges to the contemporary methodology of the law, namely a new wave of naturalistic approaches that follow the rapid progress in the studies of the mind as a basis for psychological, behavioral, and cultural phenomena. The book aims to address the extent to which new developments of a naturalistic worldview affect the methodological foundations of studying and explaining the law, and distinguishes two fundamentally different models of scientific inquiry. Interpreting legal texts has to remain an anti-naturalistic, hermeneutic enterprise, conceiving law as a combination of causally related facts. As such, its scientific status depends mostly on its ability to become a part of an interdisciplinary web of naturalistic explanations of reality.

This book presents a collection of thematically focused articles addressing culture-specific features of academic communication, with a particular focus on communication conducted in English as an Additional Language and directed at multicultural audiences. It comprises papers arranged in four sections: Expert writers, Novice writers and readers, Conference participants, and Non-research academic genres. The book explicitly addresses and is centred upon the concept of a research niche understood as a space to be captured and populated, as a temporary location to move or grow out of in the course of individual professional development from novice to expert, and as a space to consciously reach beyond, delimited by one's linguistic, cultural, educational, and geopolitical background. Here the niche is approached as a frame of reference for discussion of what is culture-bound, culture-sensitive, and culture-free in the academic community and its practices.