Faculty often have complicated relationships with academic writing, with emotions ranging across joy and frustration, from gratification to dread. Scholars trace academics’ negative affect and attendant writing challenges to the pressures of marketized higher education characterized by performance-based metrics and increased workloads that erode autonomy, time, and confidence (Saunders 2023). Seeking to mitigate such conditions, faculty writing interventions such as consultations, groups, and retreats increasingly report on wellbeing outcomes, but nonetheless fall into what Ahern-Dodson & Dufour (2023) call “the productivity trap”: by still aspiring to increase participants’ publication rates, they end up supporting exclusionary ideas of quantifiable success and aggravating the writing obstacles faculty are trying to address. Stevenson (2020) proposes foregrounding wellbeing as a foundational purpose rather than “soft outcome” (Morss & Murray 2001) of writing retreats, but expresses doubts that beneficial effects can persist when faculty return to campus. This present study explores the potential of writing programming to effect lasting change amongst faculty participants at a small, teaching-focused Canadian university. While the bulk of the study is an ongoing collaborative autoethnographic project in which participants are exploring their development through writing interventions, this presentation highlights the five foundational principles that animate the programs: focus on other-than-productivity; make visible structural issues and power relations; remain explicitly feminist and invested in identity; take a developmental approach; and ground relations in an ethic of care. I argue that such an explicitly political engagement with writing can subvert the status quo and challenge academic power relations in the neoliberal university.

Authors:
Andrea Phillipson, Mount Royal University, Canada

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Andrea Phillipson is currently an Associate Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, located on Treaty 7 territory. Her current practice and research interests include academic writing, UDL, and genealogical histories of sport.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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