Workshop « Embodied Experiences of/and Academic Writing »

Intervention de :

workshop : Embodied Experiences of/and Academic Writing

Date : 26 octobre 2023

Lieu : Turin, Italie

Organisation : Department of Cultures, Politics, Society Università di Torino


Présentation de l'intervention

Producing knowledge is a long training – years after years – requiring readings, methods, disciplines (although also an interdisciplinary discipline, sometimes) and various bodily practices (seated in library, in office, in archives, curved during in archaeological dig etc.). However, in the last years/decades, a growing body of scholars started to first identify then challenge the limits of academic writing as over-framing and therefore narrowing the horizon of thoughts. Among them, critical approaches such as feminist, queer or post/decolonial studies put in question the Science© and its writing. The most acknowledged part of this questioning was related to epistemology, disciplines and subjects. However, because critical approaches take interest in the effective interpellation of domination and power relationships, the matter was not only what is produced as science, but also how is it produced. Producing knowledge became therefore also a matter of dialog, questions, troubles, situating gestures and discourses, exploration of various (scientific and beyond) communities of practices and medium, new forms of authorship, etc. These approaches practically questioned well-established notions such as truth, objectivity, authority of the author, individuality, etc. Against the myth of a pre-discursive thinking, they seek to make visible the work of writing, as an uneven – and sometimes painful – practice, revealing draft, resuming, repetition, outage, as well as the desiring, collective, and sometimes extra-academic dimension of writing, which is often hidden.While this reflection about how to produce knowledge is not a new one, it is nevertheless a still valid and topical to anyone engaging an epistemological journey. How do we write and what does it do to knowledge?This workshop will be an exploratory time for writing, in a collective, experimental way.After a crimping introduction, anchored in feminist and queer alternatives practices of writing, we propose a writing workshop.Each participant is expected to bring sources / corpus / data / narratives / fieldwork notes / stories, that will be shared. Depending on the number of participants, one or several material will be collectively chosen, and each participant will produce a writing, focusing on the issue of visibilisation and/or invisibilisation of bodies, in the proposed material. The objective is to build a collective kaleidoscopic form able to question what our data tell us, but also how (interdisciplinary) polyphonic practice of research can enlarge our scope.Participants will be guided during the workshop.Embodied Experiences ofand Academic Writing