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uva.nl
Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR) AIHR

Creative Writing for Academics | OPEN

Using Creative Writing as a Tool in Academic Writing

This workshop makes space to explore a diverse and creative pallet of writing styles in academic writing practices.

Course description

The choices we make when we write have profound effects on the reality that we observe. Giving an account of our observations requires a multitude of styles of writing for achieving the greatest accuracy. Finding the most accurate style of writing for a particular purpose sometimes implies letting go of a seemingly neutral style of writing, instead embracing a plurality of voices, such as staging a dialogue or exploring a more poetic style. This workshop aims to explore what happens when we loosen up the frame of our habitual academic writing practice, inviting multi-layered stories to bubble up and become part of the conversation unfolding on the page.

In this two-sessions interactive workshop, Marie Beauchamps will lead you through a series of hands-on exercises to make you experience creative writing within your academic practice. You will practice writing scenes, working with sensory details, defining the main characters driving the story of your work, and staging conversations between them. There will be time for peer-review, and we will take time to reflect on what it takes to make space for creativity within our academic work. 

Practicalities

Participants will be asked to bring a text of their own to work on during the workshop. It can be an outline, a very first draft, a finished article, or everything in-between, as long as they feel comfortable working with it for the time of the workshop.

Marie did a fabulous job leading the workshop; it was clearly meaningful and energizing for those of us who participated. I just wrote to Marie to thank her directly and let her know that it came at a perfect time for me. I’m shaping my pilot study and would never have thought to incorporate creative writing, but it’s already proving extremely useful as a method to get at certain issues. My supervisors loved this and are encouraging me to incorporate creative writing as a component of my project. Stephanie Smith, PhD candidate (Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture)

Lecturer

Marie Beauchamps is an Amsterdam-based poet, creative entrepreneur, and an academic working across humanities, social sciences, and law. She holds a PhD from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam (2015); she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc fellow at Queen Mary University of London from (2019-2021), during which she pioneered in the Deepening Creative Practice programme of the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations (2020-2021). Since 2021, she works as a creative entrepreneur, exploring research and writing from new perspectives. She is certified in creative writing from the International Writers Collective, Amsterdam (2019-2022). Her article Doing Academia Differently (2021) tells the research story that paved the way for these workshops creative writing for academics.