Schedule 2024-25

Introduction Session  (10 April 16.00)

Course introduction

Live session on Zoom + recording of a brief promotional video instead on this, which will be shared for dissemination as well.

Session 1 (23 April 2024 16-17.30)

An introduction to Researching and Writing Differently

Ilaria Boncori (University of Essex, UK)

Stemming from the homonymous book in the field of management and organization studies (Boncori, 2022) this session provides an overview of Researching and Writing Differently. In particular, the seminar will explore the political inclusive potential of this approach in re-centering marginalised voices and experience.  Covering it’s origins and the historical development of what has recently become a movement against mainstream ways of thinking of, conducting and writing research, this session will also give an overview of the seminal contributions to R&WD, including key topics, methods and perspectives.

Session 2 (13 May 2024, 16.00-17.30)

Postcolonial Autoetheory

Agnes Woolley (University of Southampton, UK)

This session considers a range of autotheoretical approaches to writing criticism, with a focus on the writing of postcolonial literary and cultural critics. After exploring some examples of autotheory, thinking about its origins and contemporary iterations, we will move on to consider what role the self can / does / should play in academic research. We will analyse how we relate to our own research topics, including whether, and how, this makes its way into our writing.

Session 3 (18 June 2024 16.00-17.30)

Beautiful Writing, how to integrate beauty, joy and freedom into our writing.

Beatriz Acevedo (Anglia Ruskin, UK)

This session is based on my own experience as an odd academic and writer, wishing to have a more authentic voice and embracing the awkwardness of writing in English, while thinking in Spanish. The session will use drawing-based exercises and visual metaphors to free participants from the oppression of perfection, while embracing free flowing and curiosity in our writing and creativity.

Session 4 (4 July 2024, 16.00-17.30)

Using autoethnography in service of others in scholarly work

Rima Hussein (Northumbria University, UK)

This session will explore how we can better centre the voices of research participants when using autoethnography. I will share examples from my recent work on the domestic abuse survivor experience of family law court, exploring the power of carving out space for those that are usually unheard and othered; in this case mothers and the unheard/disbelieved stories of impact on children. This session then extends to how we can hold lived experience at the core of research projects and create interventions to better support those standing beside us whose voices are being 'represented' by us in scholarly work. A current funded research project will be the context for uncovering the challenges and huge importance of honouring lived experience of those we hope to serve, ultimately our research participants whose voices are marginalised and silenced within institutions such as courts and rarely heard or acted upon. We will end with the hope that through writing differently and researching with this approach we can enact change.

Session 5 (23 September 2024, 16-17.30)

Autoethnographic writing and collaborative autoethnography

Emmanouela Mandalaki (NEOMA Business School, France)

This seminar will discuss the genre of autoethnographic writing, focusing on its embodied, affective and relational dimensions, namely as a form of collaborative writing differently. By means of exposure to personal experiences, the seminar wishes to generate a space for reflexive debate on the challenges, opportunities and (im)possibilities involved in autoethnographic writing practices, namely when conducted as a collective endeavor. This concerns the processes of research conduct and writing as well as these of reviewing and publishing collaborative autoethnographic work. Participants will have the opportunity to engage with thought- and sense- provoking activities (to the extent allowed by the virtual format) to move, sense, reflect, think and write together and in so doing to explore novel creative avenues for engaging with their academic research and writing.

Session 6 (23 October 2024 16-18.00)

The poetics of ethnographic looking

Monika Kostera (University of Warsaw, Poland) and Joanna Srednicka (SWPS University Warsaw, Poland)

Art theorist and artist John Berger explains that seeing is more than just taking in something by the sense of sight: it establishes our place in the world. We see and we are aware that we can be seen. Looking at images and more generally, at all objects, can bring the observer into a conversation with the observed and with other observers. The ethnographic method called non-participant observation is about active looking and focusing on the immediate moment as intensely as possible. John Berger speaks of a way in which “seeing comes before words”: it is a good example of negative capability used as a research method. All things are seen afresh, without their names, and then, narrated anew, not necessarily in the same way as usually and not necessarily with the use of the everyday categories. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard speaks of the importance of developing ‘material imagination’ and focusing on the ‘poetic instant’. His work offers us guidance as to how to capture the poetics of lived experience in relation with ethnographic observation. Poetic approaches can help to communicate the insights gained this way in the form of both words and silence, which, according to Heather Höpfl, involves the entire soulful person and her context.

Session 7 (21 November 2024, 16.00-17.30)

[cancelled]

Session 8 (3 December 2024) 16.00-17.30

Using collage as a reflexive tool to support writing.

Samantha Parsley (Portsmouth University, UK) and Harriet Shortt (University of the West of England, UK)

This session will focus on an arts-based method that can be applied across disciplines. In particular, the interactive workshop with explore  'collage' as reflective tool to aid the writing process, especially when dealing with difficult or stuck emotional episodes or intangible experiences. The embodied and aesthetic experience of collage can help surface feelings and challenges in the open to make sense of them, which is often particularly useful before the writing stage. This session will include some background to collage as a feminist reflexive method, and provide some examples of its use in the literature as well as in the speakers' own practice. Participants will be invited to bring materials to their desk and cut out and make collages throughout the session. There will also be an opportunity to share what they have made and talk through their creations and what's surfaced for them during the making (if they wish to do so).

Session 9 (23 January 2025, 16.00-17.30)

Assembling Voices: Collating, Conjuring and Critiquing

Nico Pizzolato (Middlesex University)

In this session we will explore ways of collecting, invoking and critiquing existing research from the knowledge landscape we have encountered during our readings. We'll work with extracts from authors such as Maggie Nelson, Nuar Alsadir, Sara Ahmed and others to discuss the different ways in which the authors engage with the voices of their sources and incorporate them into their own arguments. In both extracts, it is worth noting the ways in which the authors' voices intersect with others’ and provide a counterpoint. Some questions we will consider are: How do we, as authors, write other voices into the texture of our arguments and accounts? What strategies do we deploy when we the "I" use to critique these texts? What are creative ways of acknowledging sources beyond standard referencing? How to balance creativity and credibility in research-informed writing?

Session 10 (20 February 2025, 16.00-17.30)

Diverse Voices in Critical Creative Writing: Decolonial and Indigenous Approaches using Storytelling, Visual Arts, Multimodality and Poetry

Anastasia Christou (Middlesex University, London, UK)

This session explores a critical creative approach to writing that argues for diverse voices to be harnessed as a means of meaningfully engaging with Indigenous and decolonial pedagogies and philosophies through using storytelling, visual arts, multimodality and poetry. The session will showcase critical frameworks and pathways for writing through and with a decolonial and Indigenous philosophy and arts based participatory approaches to engage with complex colonial, racial and epistemological questions within the writing process. We first briefly frame key theoretical and philosophical stances within critical postcolonial, Indigenous and decolonial studies from an intersectional lens, to then describe an epistemological critique discourse that will gesture towards a decolonial pathway to writing with arts/multimodality/poetry/storytelling and discuss how such creative grounding can emerge. Lastly, we reach potentialities of writing spaces where ‘southern’ philosophies can be ‘heard’ textually in their fullest complexity. Such a writing process combining creative visual arts grounded in critical decolonial and Indigenous theories and provides a space in which a decolonised knowledge seems possible. These spaces can include deconstructions of language and literacies that aim toward liberation repertoires of lived experiences of injustice and racialisation that transform into embodied knowledge making and sharing through sustained academic activism and social justice by valuing diverse voices in multimodal meaning making. This is public humanities work that calls for reworlding, co-creating, re-envisioning, debordering and re-vitalising the potential for a communal ethos in writing.

Session 11

The Politics of Writing Process/Process Writing (12 March 2025, 16:00-17:30)

Stefanie Sachsenmaier (Middlesex University)

In this session we will explore ways of writing the processual. We will critically think through academic conventions favouring Western epistemological structures that emphasise the fixity of things and consider who and what falls by the wayside. The session will offer examples of process writing from various fields, such as arts practices or lived experiences, as well as how these are positioned in epistemological terms. We will also explore the potential of what have been deemed ‘alternative philosophies’ in this context, thereby developing a knowledge political agenda that critiques hegemonic structures centring Western thought.

Concluding session (26 March 2025)

In this concluding session, we will draw from the key themes and contributions of the course, and focus on our peer assessed diary entries, to reflect on the topics, methods and resonance of our Researching and Writing at the Crossroads.