Reflections on the Reconfiguration of the Genre of the Oral Scientific Conference

in the Webinar Era and on Scientific Ethos

Résumé

Positioning the oral scientific conference as a genre in flux, this theoretical article analyses how digital environments reshape academic orality and the construction of scientific credibility. Rather than treating the conference as an oral “transfer” of written discourse, it conceptualizes it as a situated communicative dispositif in which epistemic validity and the speaker’s discursive ethos are negotiated. Building on genre theory, multi-modal discourse analysis, and rhetorical approaches, the study first revisits the conference’s rhetorical and institutional genealogies, then examines the lecturer’s discursive action under the constraints of webinars and hybrid settings. The analysis highlights a marked reconfiguration of the material ecology of speaking (visibility, interactional cues, temporalities) and of the sym-bolic economy of authority (presence, legitimacy, alignment with audiences).Yet persuasion remains a core imperative of scientific com-munication; consequently, speakers adapt their rhetorical strategies to sustain attention, involvement, and adherence despite spatial distance and mediated inter-action.