A practical three-day workshop series to explore creative writing as a method and a mode of expression within social science and humanities research.
In this series of workshops, participants tried to challenge the conventional divide between personal experience and scholarly analysis, using writing to access realms of knowledge and affect that often lie beyond the reach of traditional academic forms.
Through creative exercises, the participants were able to move beyond the colonial and racial boundaries that split the intellectual from the emotional, the mind from the body, and the researcher from their subjects—divisions often upheld as norms within academia. These boundaries restrict the ability to engage with scholarship in democratic, anti-racist, and embodied ways.
Participants engaged in free writing, creative field notes, reflective prose, and writing with photographs and other works of art. Together, these practices form a series of exercises that seek to decolonise academic knowledge production and open space to dwell within the interconnected boundaries of self, scholarship, memory and collectivity.
Examples of participants’ writing:
“In my grandmother’s time, she says that the gender binary was not so strong. How do I, as a sociologist, think about this and analyse this? Does my grandmother have sociological insight, or are her words nonsensical?”
“According to my belly, big and round and soft and cosy, there is so much more to life, and we can get through this crisis. We might feel discomfort and some pain, just there, in the belly land.“
“Racism saps the strength of the whole society. But many people do not recognise the loss because they do not value the lost people.
Meanwhile, those of us who are devalued and even dehumanised recognise that our brilliance, creativity, generosity, and leadership are all being buried, squandered in the arrogance of White supremacist ideology.
A long time ago, maybe there was a time when we recognised that we were all interdependent, needing for our survival the gifts and talents of all of those around us. We knew that we were in stone soup country. We knew that we were not self-sufficient and that everyone we met had something to teach us/give us/enlighten us/guide us/share with us, just as we also understood that we too had gifts.“
