Women Writing Socially in Academia. Dispatches from Writing Rooms
2023, Palgrave Macmillan Cham, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education
Edited by Joana Pais Zozimo, Kate Sotejeff-Wilson, Wendy Baldwin
In the spring of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic shattered their ability to invite others to write with them in their usual spaces, a group of structured writing retreat facilitators turned to the Facebook group that had been launched barely two months prior. Feeling unmoored amid all the uncertainty of the moment and needing to write, they started to write together online. They caught up, laughed, and shared struggles, fears, achievements, and hopes—whatever was important in coping with the moment. They also discussed ways to foster writing and community with the many academic writers who were facing terrible uncertainty, increased isolation, and, for many women academics, an increase in responsibility and affective labour. This book was born out of those conversations.
The book offers a multifaceted perspective on social writing in a volatile, uncertain and complex world. It meets the need to enable women’s capacity, especially in academic settings, to structure their own writing practice and that of others in the community. It expands current research on social writing beyond its core context in English-speaking countries to multilingual contexts from Portugal to Finland, identifying fruitful areas for interdisciplinary research, nexuses of social practice, and strategies for situated social learning through a feminist lens, bringing women from the margins to the centre. As the average woman academic with children is losing an hour of research and writing time every day in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the impact of which will be felt for decades, the book purposefully entwines these polyphonic voices to tell the story of a writing retreat as a space for leadership and empowerment.
Six of WRAP’s founding members – Jo Garrick, Joana Pais Zozimo, Kate Sotejeff-Wilson, Rowena Murray, Sarah Haas and Wendy Baldwin – contributed to the volume.
Chapters
- Introduction: From Our Writing Rooms to Yours, Joana Pais Zozimo, Kate Sotejeff-Wilson, Wendy Baldwin
- Look Out!: Navigating Multiple Spaces to Sustain the Benefits of Writing Retreats, Rowena Murray
- Thoughts on folklore, Lucy R. Hinnie
- Don’t Starve: Change the Recipe, Jess Kelley
- Retreat in Daily Life: Integrating Writing into Work and Life, Kate Sotejeff-Wilson
- Some Kind of Writer: The Writer Spectrum, and a (Not-Magic) Formula for Skill Development, Sarah S. Haas
- Coaching Interventions in Writing Retreats: A Creativity Boost, Natalie Lancer
- Adapting the Structured Model, Developing Researchers, and Facilitating Your Own Productivity as a Writer, Jo Garrick
- Different Layers of Togetherness: Virtual Writing Sessions During and After Covid-19, Katarina Damčević
- Transferring Social Writing Practices to Our Communities in Finnish Universities, Camilla Lindholm, Johanna Isosävi
- Becoming a Facilitator: Finding My Own Delivery Style Through Opportunities and Challenges, Marcella Sutcliffe
- Linguistic Care Work in Proximal Zones: Towards Allied Author–Editor Critical Agency, Theresa Truax-Gischler
- Meetings at the Textface: What Academics and Language Professionals Gain When They Team Up and Adopt a Social Writing Approach to Academic Text Production, Wendy Baldwin
Writing for Research and Academic Practice 