WEEK 1: DRAW (Departing Radically in Academic Writing)

WEEK 1: Monday 11 November - Friday 15 November

The first week of DRAW will introduce HDR students to concepts of creative post-academic writing practices and focus on the theories that inform radical and alternative ways of producing academic writing. Each half-day session (9:00am-1:00pm) is structured around the three themes of reading (engaging with theoretical discussions relevant to post-qualitative writing), writing (practicing writing techniques) and sharing (conversation and critique) with the work of particular “post” theorists as a guide. A more detailed program will be shared closer to the commencement of DRAW.

Overview 

The capacity to write sits at the heart of the academic work and is crucial to achieving success. For higher degree research students, academic writing calls for various skills, competencies and knowledges, and is experienced as a process of participating and becoming adept in the textual and discursive practices of specific disciplinary cultures. In this way, “academic writing is not only an individual act, but also a social condition” (Lonka et al., 2014, p. 246) and an academic text, as Derrida suggests, must take “its part in the genre, the type, the context” (1986/1992, p. 68). Moreover, “post” scholarship in the field of “post-qualitative” research (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013)—including education—has simultaneously “troubled” and “opened up” possibilities for what the “product” of academic writing might come to be. DRAW responds to the question, “What might the work of creative and alternative academic writing as inquiry in ‘post’ qualitative research look like?” and aims to provide an intensive praxis-based teaching and learning environment for qualitative HDR students in HASS to engage, explore, and experiment with creative and alternative academic writing practices.

How do I apply?

If you would like to attend week one, week two or both weeks, please complete the expression of interest form by 25 October 2019. There will be no cost to you to attend the DRAW writing summer school and this initiative is supported by the School of Education.

More information

If you would like further information about DRAW, please contact e.mackinlay@uq.edu.au.

About the presenters

Liz (Elizabeth) Mackinlay is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland where she teaches Research Methods, Gender Studies and Arts Education. She holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from The University of Adelaide and a PhD in education from the University of Queensland. Her book, Teaching and learning like a feminist: Storying our experiences in higher education was published by Sense Publishers in 2016 and together with Briony Lipton, co-authored the 2017 Palgrave publication, We only talk feminist here: Feminist academics, voice and agency in the neo-liberal university. Her most recent book, Critical writing for embodied approaches: Autoethnography, feminism and decoloniality was published by Palgrave in 2019. She was awarded the esteemed Norman Denzin International Prize for Qualitative Research in 2018 and is regularly invited to present workshops on “post” academic and qualitative writing nationally and internationally.

Karen Madden is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Associate Professor Elizabeth Mackinlay and Dr Christine Gowlett, examining feminist leadership in the context of girls’ schools. Karen’s research adopts a critical feminist perspective of educational leadership, as she explores her own “becoming feminist” life (Ahmed, 2017, Living a Feminist Life) as a leader in a girls’ school. As she grapples with her growing awareness of the ways in which she experiences both the oppression of her gender in a patriarchal society, and the privilege afforded to her whiteness, she delves into the complexity of feminist subjectivities through the telling of her own story. Drawing inspiration from Elizabeth Mackinlay, Carolyn Ellis and Stacy Holman Jones, with Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches: Autoethnography, Feminism and Decoloniality (Mackinlay, 2019), and The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel About Autoethnography (Ellis, 2004) as central texts in her thesis writing, Karen is attempting a radical departure of the autoethnographic kind.

REFERENCES

Derrida, J. (1986/1992). “There is no one narcissism” (Autobiographies) (D. Cahen, Interviewer). In J. Derrida & E. Weber (Eds.), & P. Kamuf & Others (Trans.), Points…: Interviews, 1974-1994 (pp. 196-215). Stanford, CA: Stanford University press.

Lonka , K., Cho , A., Keskinen, J., Hakkarainen, K., Sandström, N., & Pyhältö, K. (2014). How to measure PhD students conceptions of academic writing and well-being? Journal of Writing Research, 5(3), 245-269.

Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629-633.