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.

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Decolonisation Resources

Posted by Helen Kara

I wanted to compile a list of online resources around decolonisation, for my benefit as well as yours, so I went looking. And I found that other people already had this idea and did the work. Quite a number of other people, in fact. I found three good long lists that already existed online, and I have put them here in a list of their own.

I haven’t checked all of the resources listed, because there are thousands. Many are open access, freely available online as web pages, videos, podcasts, and suchlike. There are also books, films, artworks, and so on – my Christmas list has grown considerably in the course of this exercise!

The first one I found is from a symposium, held at the University of East Anglia in the UK in 2018, on decolonising the curriculum. This led to a ‘researchathon’ to create a list of relevant resources, which is now an open access list on Zotero. There are over 1,000 resources in this list alone, and many are free to access.

The second is from another UK university, SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies), which has a Decolonising SOAS Working Group, set up in 2016. The Group has produced a list of learning and teaching resources, plus events, media coverage, reading suggestions, podcasts, videos and more.

The third is from a conference held in 2019 by Monash University from Australia at their European base in Prato, Italy. This is another long list, divided into non-fiction, fiction and art, activism, community projects, events, publications, and other resource lists – mostly reading lists.

This post may be short but it leads to a wealth of content. Are there other lists I should include? If so, please let me know in the comments.

This blog, and the monthly #CRMethodsChat on Twitter, is funded by my beloved patrons. It takes me at least one working day per month to post here each week and run the Twitterchat. At the time of writing I’m receiving funding from Patrons of $71 per month. If you think a day of my time is worth more than $71 – you can help! Ongoing support would be fantastic but you can also make a one-time donation through the PayPal button on this blog if that works better for you. Support from Patrons and donors also enables me to keep this blog ad-free. If you are not able to support me financially, please consider reviewing any of my books you have read – even a single-line review on Amazon or Goodreads is a huge help – or sharing a link to my work on social media. Thank you!

Australasian Research Ethics

Posted by Helen Kara

Systems of research ethics regulation differ around the world. Some countries have no research ethics regulation system at all. Others may have a system but, if they do, it is only available in their home language so people like me who only speak and read English are unable to study that system (Israel 2015:45). The main English-speaking countries tend to have formal systems of research ethics regulation, stemming from biomedical research in response to ethical crises such as Nuremberg and Tuskegee. These are usually implemented through research ethics committees or their equivalents such as institutional review boards in the US.

One big difference in Australasia is that work on research ethics by and for Indigenous communities seems to be further ahead in Australia and New Zealand than in any other continental region as a whole. Australia has the Guidelines for Ethical Research in Australian Indigenous Studies produced by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). AIATSIS is a statutory organisation, set up by white settlers in the 1960s and governed by a Council, with the first Aboriginal Council member joining in 1970. The Council is now predominantly made up of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. The latest edition of the Guidelines is dated 2012 but they are under review at the time of writing. In New Zealand, Māori people with experience from research ethics committees came together to write Te Ara Tika, a document offering guidelines for Māori research ethics published in 2010. These kinds of guidelines help Indigenous peoples to claim their right of research sovereignty, i.e. control over the conduct of and participation in research that affects them. However, they are not necessarily aligned with each other, or with other systems of ethical governance for research that may exist in the same jurisdictions. This may hamper collaborative or multi-area research and lead to increased separation rather than reconciliation between peoples (Ríos, Dion and Leonard 2018).

So it’s a complex and fascinating picture. I am fortunate to be working on a project at present with three experts in Australasian research ethics: Gary Allen, Mark Israel, and Colin Thomson. (The sharp-eyed among you may notice that I cited Israel in the first paragraph above. He has written a rather good book on research ethics subtitled Beyond Regulatory Compliance and now in its second edition.) Together they are the senior consultants of the Australasian Human Research Ethics Consultancy (AHRECS), established in 2007 to provide expert consultancy services around research ethics in Australasia and Asia-Pacific. AHRECS also works with Indigenous consultants from both Australia and New Zealand, one of the latter being Barry Smith who is a co-author of Te Ara Tika.

The amount of expertise in AHRECS is enormous. Better still, they offer to share some of this expertise to anyone who wants to sign up for their free monthly e-newsletter on research ethics (and I can confirm from experience that they don’t spam you). Link here (scroll down, it’s on the right). Their blog provides a useful archive and they accept guest posts on relevant topics; I just wrote one for them on The Ethics of Evaluation Research. So you get two for the price of one this week!

This blog is funded by my beloved patrons. It takes me around one working day per month to post here each week. At the time of writing I’m receiving funding of $17 per month. If you think 4-5 of my blog posts is worth more than $17 – you can help! Ongoing support would be fantastic but you can also support for a single month if that works better for you. Support from Patrons also enables me to keep this blog ad-free. If you are not able to support me financially, please consider reviewing any of my books you have read – even a single-line review on Amazon or Goodreads is a huge help – or sharing a link to my work on social media. Thank you!

Rowan the Rigorous Research Rabbit

Posted by Helen Kara

Middle poster-min I have more exciting news! But first: why is this blog like a bus stop? Because you wait ages for posts with exciting news, then two come along in quick succession!

Further to last week’s comics extravaganza, this week I would like to present an animation I wrote, which has been animated by clever and diligent students at Staffordshire University. The idea for this came from Alke Gröppel-Wegener. She and I were chatting over lunch late last year and I told her about the comic I was writing. “Why don’t you write an animation, too?” she asked. “Because I don’t know how to write an animation and I don’t know any animators,” I said, thinking that was a fairly conclusive argument. But Alke brushed away my objections with a flick of her hand, explained there were student animators at the University, and proclaimed her conviction that of course I could write an animation if I tried.

So I went home and asked the internet how to write an animation and whaddaya know, it knew. I was also very lucky to work with Laura Weston, a knowledgeable and gifted tutor who downloaded segments of her brain into mine on demand. And as for the animators – well!

Laura told me I’d be working with third-years. She helped me to put together a brief, mainly by reining me in when I got all enthusiastic about over-complicating things, and then she publicised the brief. To begin with we asked for character sketches and received several submissions. It was so hard to choose between them that I ended up asking two people to work together – and then discovered that (a) Kalina Kolchevska and Kiefer Bray were first-years and (b) they were already good friends and happy to collaborate. They did a great job creating our hero Rowan and his evil nemesis Cavil the Carrot Fly.

Then I went to meet with a group of third-years, had a chat with them about the freelance lifestyle, and explained that I wanted to put a team together to create the animation. I am so pleased that Carolann Dalziel, aka Caz, volunteered to be the producer, because she did an amazing job. I am also very pleased that Aimee Carter volunteered to direct. I would have been happy with whoever wanted to work on the project, but I am honestly delighted to have had two women working with me as the animation industry is so male-dominated. (I’m also delighted that my comic was illustrated by a woman because that industry is too.)

The rest of the team included artistic director and lead animator Janine Perkins, sound technician and background artist Cameron Jones, Aneesa Malik and David Trotter who drew the storyboards, and Kiefer Bray and Ash Michaelson who worked as junior animators. They have all done such a terrific job that the animation looks very professional. I went to the end-of-year degree show at Staffordshire University earlier this month, where the animation was first shown to the public, and it got excellent feedback.

It is of course about research methods: in particular, how to choose a research question. This is something that troubles students year after year, all around the world. Caz and Aimee, Kalina and Kiefer, Aneesa and David, Janice and Cameron and Ash and I all hope that the animation we have made will help students through this knotty problem. Check it out and see what you think. It’s only one minute long.

Conversation With A Purpose

Posted by Helen Kara

covertest2 I have exciting news! This has been a long time in the planning and making, and has come to fruition in part thanks to the support of my beloved patrons. The inspiration came almost two years ago, at one of the pedagogy sessions of the 2016 Research Methods Festival. Research colleagues from the UK’s National Centre for Research Methods, where I am a Visiting Fellow, talked about the difficulty in bridging the gap between classroom and practice when teaching research methods. It occurred to me then that comics and graphic novels could have a useful role to play here, and I vowed to do what I could to make that happen.

Today, I am glad to launch my first research methods comic online. It’s called Conversation With A Purpose and it tells the story of a student’s first real-life interview. I wrote the words, but I couldn’t have made a comic without a collaborator, because I can draw the curtains but that’s about all. My colleague and friend Dr Katy Vigurs put me in touch with Gareth Cowlin who teaches on the Cartoon and Comic Arts degree course at Staffordshire University. I presented his students with a brief, and was lucky enough to recruit the very talented Sophie Jackson to create the artwork for the comic. Sophie is not only a highly skilled artist, she is also a joy to work with, so the entire project was a delight from start to finish.

The in-person launch happened last Friday night at Show and Tell, Staffordshire University’s 2018 art and design degree show. I also launched another creative teaching aid at the show, but you’ll have to wait till next week to find out about that! People’s feedback on the comic was very positive, though I wasn’t surprised because we had already received terrific testimonials from a couple of eminent scholars.

And you know the best part of all? You can download the comic, Conversation With A Purpose, and you will find instructions for printing it here. It will look best if you have a colour printer, though it should also work in monochrome. The comic includes discussion questions for use in the classroom.

Please enjoy, use, and share our comic. And if you would like to help me create more resources like this, please consider joining my patrons. I love producing free stuff to help students and teachers but, as an independent researcher with no guaranteed salary, my resources are very limited. This is where every single supporter makes a real difference.

Free Online Research Ethics Resources

Posted by Helen Kara

free Are you grappling with research ethics? If so, fear not, for there are numerous free resources online to help you. Here are some examples.

Ethical codes and guidelines

There are loads of ethical codes and guidelines online. For example, some countries have national codes of research ethics, such as the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, or the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans. This was developed in partnership between the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

There are also codes of research ethics produced by Indigenous peoples who wish their own ethical principles to be followed by any researchers who wish to work with them. Examples of these include Te Ara Tika, Guidelines for Māori Research Ethics, from New Zealand, and the San Code of Research Ethics from South Africa.

Then there are professional and disciplinary codes of research ethics. Examples include the UK-based Market Research Society’s Code of Conduct, and the Code of Ethics of the Australian Association for Research in Education.

There must be a huge number of these kinds of codes and guidelines worldwide. They are not all the same, and the careful reader can find places where one code or guideline may contradict another. This is because of cultural (in its widest sense) differences in ideas of what is ethical. Nevertheless, they can be useful to read for learning, ideas, or of course specific contextual information.

Applying to a research ethics committee

If you have to apply to a research ethics committee for formal ethical approval, you might find it useful to see some other researchers’ successful application forms. You can find examples of these on The Research Ethics Application Database (TREAD), originally set up by Martin Tolich at Otago University in New Zealand and now hosted by The Global Health Network and the Social Research Association. This database holds copies of successful ethics applications from around the world which you can search and use for inspiration and learning. Applications are anonymised, though the researcher(s) must be named. Researchers often submit accompanying documents, such as consent forms and participant information sheets, which can be very useful to look through for ideas. The database managers are keen to add more applications, to help make formal ethical approval processes more accessible and less onerous. If you have an application you could submit, there is information on the website about how to share it via the database.

General guidance

The Research Ethics Guidebook is intended to provide general guidance for social scientists, but may also be useful for people from other fields. The Guidebook is supported by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, with the Researcher Development Initiative of the National Centre for Research Methods, and London University’s Institute of Education. Like TREAD, the Research Ethics Guidebook holds useful information about applying for formal ethical approval. However, it also covers other areas such as ethics in research design, conducting research, reporting, and dissemination. The Guidebook is ideal for reference at the start of a project, and also during research as unforeseen ethical dilemmas occur.

Ethics training

There are two free online courses in research ethics which are primarily geared towards health researchers and so focus heavily on participant wellbeing. Both have been through peer review and other quality assurance processes, and both offer certificates to students who complete the course successfully with a score of 80% or more. One is called Research Ethics Online Training and is adapted from an e-learning course and resource package designed and produced by the World Health Organisation. It contains 14 individual modules, plus resources in the form of a glossary, a “resource library” (aka bibliography), some case studies, examples of ethics guidelines, videos on research ethics, and links to other ethics websites. The second is Essential Elements of Ethics, adapted from an ethics tool kit created to support researchers at Harvard University in America. This course contains 11 modules, plus resources including a workbook and checklist of points to consider, and a discussion forum though this is not very active.

Free research ethics modules with a wider perspective are offered by Duke University in America. These cover topics such as cultural awareness and humility, ethical photography, power and privilege, and working with children. They are delivered through videos with transcripts also available.

Online research

For internet-based research, the Association of Internet Researchers has some useful resources free for download. The British Psychological Society offers Ethics Guidelines for Internet-mediated Research. The South East European Network for Professionalization of Media has produced Social Media Research: A Guide to Ethics.

Visual research

The International Visual Sociology Association has produced a Code of Research Ethics and Guidelines covering visual research.

Ethics of research publication

The Committee on Publication Ethics has a whole range of downloadable resources covering how to detect, prevent and handle misconduct, responsible publication standards for editors and authors, ethical guidelines for peer reviewers, and much more.

This list of resources is by no means exhaustive. There are loads more out there. It would be a huge task to identify them all. These are the ones I have found particularly useful. If there are any you like to use, which aren’t in this post, please add them in the comments below.

Creative Methods for Evaluation: A Frustration

Posted by Helen Kara

frustration Evaluation is a particular type of applied research designed to assess the value of a service, intervention, policy or other such phenomenon. This is relevant to all of us as it forms the basis for many decisions about public service provision. Despite being applied research, evaluation also has a significant academic profile, with dedicated journals, many books, and university departments with professors of evaluation in countries around the world.

There are a range of types of, and approaches to, evaluation research. They all have some things in common: they start with the desired outcomes of the service, intervention etc; formulate indicators that would show those outcomes had been met; then collect data in line with those indicators and analyse it to identify the extent to which the outcomes have been met. So, for example, if a community service aims to reduce loneliness, they might decide that one indicator could be a reduction of reports of loneliness to community-based doctors and nurses, then work with health colleagues to collect information from health records before and after the provision of the service to show whether there was any difference. Evaluators also write recommendations for ways to improve the service, intervention etc. The intention is that these recommendations are implemented, then later reviewed in another cycle of evaluation research.

The basics of general research practice also apply to evaluation: plan thoroughly, collect and analyse data, produce written and other outcomes, and publish your findings. From time to time I teach a course called ‘Creative Research Methods for Evaluation’, usually as part of the UK and Ireland Social Research Association’s open training programme. All sorts of people come on this course: central and local Government researchers, charity researchers, health researchers, researchers in private practice, research funders – a real mix, which makes it great fun.

I know quite a bit about creative methods; after all, I wrote a book on the subject. I tell my students about arts-based methods, research using technology, mixed methods, and transformative research frameworks. We talk about when these methods are appropriate to use, and how they can work side-by-side with more established methods. I give them lots of examples of creative methods in use.

And here is the huge frustration. While I have plenty of examples of creative methods in practice, very few come from evaluation research. I have some examples from my own practice, though only as verbal stories because the written and other outputs are subject to client confidentiality. This is a big problem with evaluation research: because it is applied, i.e. often conducted by and for individual organisations, it is rarely published beyond its immediate audience. When it is published, it is often simply uploaded to a web page and so disappears into the depths of the internet. And if it is both published and findable, it is not likely to include the use of creative methods.

There are many examples of perfectly competent evaluations using well-established methods. However, evaluators today are working on complex projects and benefit from having more methodological options at their fingertips. I know my course helps, because former students have told me so, but during the course someone always asks why I’m not using examples from evaluation research. (Even though I explain this problem at the start!) I wish I could use such examples; I’m sure they’re out there; but even though I have searched, and asked, and searched again, I can’t find them. So this is by way of an appeal: do you know of any good resources that showcase creative methods in evaluation research? By ‘good resources’ I mean well written outputs or short engaging videos (3-4 minutes at most) that are not too basic, as my students are generally quite experienced. If you have anything to suggest, please let me know in the comments.