Enfleshed writing practices – Are you feeling it yet? | Dr Amanda French

Academic writing is a contingent yet ever present ‘thing’ in the Academy, which academics and students feel positive and negative about.  This paper draws on data collected for my PhD where became very clear that participants, especially female participants, had experienced the process of producing academic writing in very physical and emotional ways. This was manifest in the intense language and physical metaphors used to describe their feelings about writing as they transitioned to university, thence from undergraduate to postdoctoral studies and into the world of academic publishing.

This paper explores how my female  participants articulated the intensity and emotional nature of their academic writing experiences using words like ‘fear’, ‘frustration’, ‘outrage’ ‘exhaustion’ and ‘yearning’. These splashes of emotion were real ‘hot spots’ in my data which indicated the importance of the affective domain to personal and professional academic writing identities, especially for female academics.

Please book your place on this workshop emailing Yanyan Wang at Yanyan.Wang@bcu.ac.uk