Write Your Doctoral Research Differently

Posted by Helen Kara

When I wrote my doctoral thesis, nearly 20 years ago now, I wanted to write it creatively. I was already a professional writer and I could see the potential for creative approaches to help me communicate the points I needed to make. Also, I gathered data in the form of stories, so to me it made sense that my thesis should be made up of stories too. But my supervisors were resistant. After some discussions, they allowed me to write one chapter creatively, as long as I wrote the rest of my thesis in a conventional style.

The difference between then and now is that back in the mid-2000s, the literature on writing creatively in academia was very limited. Laurel Richardson’s seminal Fields of Play was available, but it was on its own at that time; there was no body of literature from which to build a rationale for using creative techniques in academic writing. And of course that was exactly what I needed to do to reassure my supervisors about the merits of my intended approach.

But now there is such a body of literature! In this post I share four particularly useful books, all published in the last couple of years. Also, they are all well referenced, so you can use them to find other literature, if you wish. Then you can create a cogent, evidence-based argument for using creative techniques in writing your doctoral dissertation or thesis.

I also want to recommend Fields of Play. Although it was written late in the last century, it is still highly relevant today. Laurel Richardson dismantles the rationale for the norms of conventional academic writing such as passive voice and authorial authority. Then she creates a new rationale for using fiction techniques, poetry, drama and other creative approaches in academic writing. And she practises what she preaches within the text, to excellent effect.

Reimagining Doctoral Writing (University of Colorado Press, April 2022) is edited by Cecile Badenhorst, Brittany Amell and James Burford. This edited collection is all about doctoral writing. Authors come from around the world, and they investigate doctoral writing from a range of perspectives and in a range of contexts. They also consider some potential futures of doctoral writing. This book is available as an open access ebook through the WAC Clearing House.

Doing Rebellious Research: In and Beyond the Academy (Brill, May 2022) is edited by Pam Burnard, Elizabeth Mackinlay, David Rousell and Tatjana Dragovic. This edited collection has four parts. The second part is called ‘Rebellious Writings Written Differently: A Manifesto’. It contains seven chapters and a set of reflective questions, and overall is designed to encourage and inspire a radical approach to academic communication.

Refining Your Academic Writing (Routledge, December 2022) is by Pat Thomson. This short book treats revision as not a boring mechanical process but a creative, imaginative craft. It is part of the Insider Guides to Success in Academia series which, in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out is co-edited by Pat and me. But I am recommending this book here, not simply because it’s in our series, but because it is as useful and radical as the others in this post.

Creative Writing for Social Research (Policy Press, January 2021) is by Richard Phillips and me, with 14 tremendous contributors who put the principles set out in the book into practice. We have received excellent feedback on this book, such as: ‘The text is well written and engaging… I would recommend this book to all qualitative researchers.’ Thank you Ruthi Margulis for your heartwarming review in Research Matters (Dec 2021, p 13), the quarterly magazine for researchers published by the Social Research Association.

These books are in general a pleasure to read. They are well written and full of ideas, encouragement, and inspiration. And it’s not only the books – if you want more personalised support with your thesis writing, you can always come on one of my writing retreats (if there are still places available). Whatever resources you draw on, I wish you joy of your doctoral writing.

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Resources for Creative Academic Writing

Posted by Helen Kara

I am delighted to say that creative academic writing is gaining in popularity and acceptance, at least in some parts of the world. I have been teaching creative thesis writing and creative academic writing at universities around the world since 2015, and I know many postgraduate students and early career researchers are keen to learn and to apply their learning. I know they also, sometimes, meet resistance from their supervisors or managers. The best way to overcome this resistance is to formulate an academic argument based on academic resources. I am happy to say there are now a range of resources people can cite as they outline the rationale for writing creatively in academia.

The main reason for writing creatively is that it makes your writing more interesting and memorable for your readers. I’m sure most of us want other people to be interested in our work and remember the points we make. However, the thought of writing creatively can be daunting for those of us who have learned to report as factually as possible. The good news is we don’t have to use creativity at a macro level, such as by producing graphic novels, epic poems or full-length screenplays – though for those of us with the talent and dedication, macro creativity is certainly an option. But we can all use micro creativity: sensory language, imagery, metaphor and so on. And if we’re not sure how, these resources will help.

The first is a book edited by Pamela Burnard, Elizabeth Mackinlay, David Rousell and Tatjana Dragovic: Doing Rebellious Research In and Beyond the Academy, and in particular, Part 2, which focuses on ‘rebellious writings’. I am not highlighting this book because Pam has kindly agreed to give the first keynote at the International Conference on Creative Research Methods next year. I am highlighting it because it is a wonderful, transgressive, boundary-bulldozing book. It was published in 2022 and uses colour and theory, poems and images, concepts and diagrams, prose and music, and a bunch of other devices to get its points across. This book is a real tour de force and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The next book is edited by Cecile Badenhorst, Brittany Amell and James Burford: Re-imagining Doctoral Writing. This one was published in 2021 and is also available as an open access ebook. While it is evidently aimed at doctoral students, I think it could be useful to any academic writer wanting to work more creatively. I found it interesting, informative and thought-provoking, and I have been doing academic writing at postgraduate level and beyond since 1999.

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In 2022 a book was published focusing on creative academic writing in a single discipline. When that happens, you know an approach is taking hold. Edited by Francesca Cavallerio, it is Creative Nonfiction in Sport and Exercise Research. There is no paperback at present, only a very expensive hardback or a quite expensive ebook, so it is best to use if you have access to an academic library. Again, I think it would be helpful for people in any discipline wanting to write more creatively.

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So far, these are all edited collections. In 2021 a book was published written by Richard Phillips and, er, me, called Creative Writing for Social Research: A Practical Guide. We included 14 creative contributions from 17 researcher-writers to show how this can work in practice. I’m pleased to say we’ve had excellent feedback on the book so far. It even generated an online book club in the year of its publication.

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There are a couple of potentially useful open access journals, too, each founded in 2020. Both are aimed at the humanities, but again people working in other sectors may well find articles that are of use to them. One is from the Rochester Institute of Technology in the US, and it is the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. The other is from the UK National Association of Writers in Education (aka NAWE), and it is the Journal of Creative Writing Research.

I am quite sure this is not an exhaustive list, though I hope it will be a useful one. If you have other resources to add, please share them in the comments.

Creative Writing for Social Research

Posted by Helen Kara

Today is the official launch day for Creative Writing for Social Research, the book Richard Phillips and I have written, with 14 short contributions from other creative scholarly writers. I am so proud of this book! It is not perfect – no book is perfect – but I think it is the book I am most proud to have written. We will be on Twitter for much of the day: you can find all the launch information via #CreativeAcWri.

Every book has out-takes; good sections that, for sensible reasons, don’t make the final cut. To celebrate the launch of this book, I thought I would share one of its out-takes that I drafted, and was – am – fond of, but which just didn’t fit. It is about field notes, and centres on an excerpt from Eating Soup Without A Spoon by Jeffrey Cohen. That is an ethnography I love because, unlike most anthropologists, the author discusses his methods.

Here is the out-take:

“Ethnographers, who might spend years living with the people they are studying, were the first social researchers to use their own field notes as data. In the early 1990s, the American anthropologist Jeffrey Cohen and his wife Maria spent a year living in the rural village of Santa Ana del Valle in Oaxaca district in Mexico. Cohen writes eloquently about the complexity hidden by the glib term ‘field notes’ (2015:39-40):

Each night found me sitting at my desk writing notes; in fact, most nights found me writing at least two and sometimes three different kinds of notes.

The first notes, to which Maria contributed as well, were daily diary-like entries recording observations and exploring our experiences as we were introduced to village life. We wrote about shopping, about social life and the gendered divisions that defined what men and women were doing in their lives and around their homes, managing kitchens and the challenge of keeping a house clean.

I also described our home and the houses we visited, noting the physical trappings of life such as the layout of compounds, what people owned, and what luxuries were present.

A second set of notes was anthropological. Although they also explored our experiences in and around the village and market, they were organized around critical themes in anthropological theory… I would use these notes to think about economic change… family cooperation and reciprocity… the efforts to… not simply survive but thrive in the changing world… in my notes I could explore how [these efforts] worked, how they failed, and how they matched up to my expectations and training.

The third set of notes was much more personal and reflected my sense of self and my own experiences. On occasion I wrote letters to long-dead ancestors in anthropology. Looking back on that odd process, I can see it was one way I was able to deal with the ghosts of anthropology’s past that haunted me.

This is a lovely depiction of writing in practice as a method of turning experiences into data. It is also a clear illustration of writing as friend, teacher, and therapist. In the first set of notes we can see writing as a friend to whom Cohen recounted daily events, in the second a teacher showing Cohen how to think about his work and link theory to practice, and in the third a therapist who helped Cohen manage his feelings of being haunted by anthropological ghosts.

This kind of creative ethnographic writing can generate lots of rich data. The downside is the huge amount of work resulting at the analytic stage. For some people, this is so overwhelming that they never complete their research (Cohen 2015:150). Even for those who do find a way through the analytic morass, it will be ‘hard, exhausting work’ that is incredibly time-consuming (Cohen 2015:149). Though again, here, there are creative writing techniques which can help, and we’ll be highlighting some of those later in this section. However, unless you are doing this kind of ethnographic work, we would advise you to limit the amount of data you generate. Working with creative writing can be fun and interesting and so it’s tempting to keep on going. But as we’ve seen, this can present considerable difficulties for analysis, so we recommend resisting any such temptation.”

That should have given you a flavour of the book Richard and I have written. I use the conceptions of writing as ‘friend, teacher, and therapist’ in teaching creative and productive thesis writing to doctoral students. I tell them writing is a teacher; we learn as we write, often surprising ourselves. Writing can be a therapist: obviously an actual therapist is, generally speaking, more use, but if you have a distressing or complicated experience during research, writing about it can be cathartic and help you process your feelings. And writing is always there for you; sometimes annoying and disappointing, but reliable and reasonably predictable, like a good friend.

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