Researching and Writing Differently: Rethinking Academic Practice
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Academic research is often shaped by conventions about what counts as rigorous research, legitimate knowledge and appropriate academic writing. These conventions can be useful, but they can also become so familiar that we rarely stop to ask how they shape our research questions, methods, relationships and ways of communicating what we discover.
This interdisciplinary workshop introduces participants to Researching and Writing Differently (R&WD), an increasingly influential movement that challenges conventional approaches to academic research and writing. Drawing on her book and wider academic work, Professor Ilaria Boncori will explore the development of R&WD, its interdisciplinary character and its potential to open up different ways of thinking about academic practice.
The workshop will consider what it might mean to research and write differently, not simply by adopting new methods, but by questioning the assumptions that underpin how academic knowledge is produced and communicated. Particular attention will be given to creative and arts-informed approaches, reflexive and relational forms of writing, and the possibilities offered by approaches grounded in care, collaboration, inclusion and experimentation.
Rather than presenting R&WD as a single methodology or prescribing an alternative model of academic practice, the workshop will create space to think collectively about the choices researchers make: how we formulate questions, how we encounter and represent our research subjects and materials, how we write, and how we communicate knowledge to academic and wider audiences.
These questions have relevance across disciplinary boundaries. For socio-legal researchers and scholars working in law and the humanities, they offer an opportunity to consider how established forms of legal and scholarly writing might be complemented - or productively unsettled - by creative, reflective and interdisciplinary approaches. For researchers in criminology, history and the wider social sciences and humanities, the workshop provides an opportunity to explore how different forms of research and writing might affect the kinds of knowledge that can be produced and shared.
The event is therefore intended not only for those already working with creative or qualitative approaches, but for anyone interested in the relationship between research, writing and knowledge production. It will be particularly relevant to PhD students and researchers at all career stages who want to experiment with their scholarly practice, reflect critically on established conventions, or explore possibilities for interdisciplinary research and collaboration.
Professor Ilaria Boncori, Professor of Organisational Behaviour in Organisation Studies and Human Resources Management at Essex Business School, will lead the workshop. A qualitative researcher working with ethnographic, narrative and arts-based methods, her research explores inequality, social justice and academic practice. Her work on Researching and Writing Differently has contributed to wider conversations about more creative, reflexive, caring and inclusive forms of scholarship.
Hosted by the Birkbeck Centre for the Study of Law and Humanities, the event brings these conversations into dialogue with legal and socio-legal scholarship and creates a space for researchers from different disciplinary traditions to exchange ideas about how we research, write and produce knowledge.
Contact name: Susy Menis
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