“Save this for your autobiography”

Part 2 in our series on Writing Advice. To read part 1, click here. 

By: Thomas Michael Swensen, Colorado State University  

When I was 26 I started at a community college with aspirations to learn how to become an architect. Not just any architect, but one who designed and built sets for rock bands like Mark Fisher. Along with a drafting course, and one in creative writing, I enrolled in the course “Race, Class, and Gender in Film.” As an introduction to academic prose, I read the articles “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice” by M. Jacqui Alexander and, “More Human Than I Am Alone: Womb Envy in David Cronenberg’s the Fly and Dead Ringers,” by Helen W. Robbins. Though I’d written punk songs, short plays, and fictional stories previous to this course yet the deft work of academic writing drew me in a way that these other forms hadn’t.

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#FreeWorkFeb

Academic life is unfortunately full of unpaid, unrecognized labour. So much of what we do is for expected to be done for ‘free’, being outside of our job descriptions and time that we’re actually paid for. February, though the shortest month, is smack dab in the middle of the semester and can feel like the most demanding.

In an effort to reveal just how much free work we do in the academy, and maybe co-commiserate, we’re asking you to keep a list of all of the free work you do in February for the CES blog. (Yes, we know this is ironically adding a bit to your pile for February!) We’ll post all of these lists on the Critical Ethnic Studies blog in March as ‘listicles’. You can also tweet parts of your list using #freeworkfeb

Get in touch, and submit your list at  justice@criticalethnicstudies.org or tweet us at @CESJournal using the hashtag #freeworkfeb

Developing a Daily Writing Habit: Writing as Process

Part 1 in our series on writing advice. Want to share the best advice you've received on writing? Sign up here. 

By: Jillian Paragg, University of Alberta

I look at what I write so I can see what I think - W.H. Auden

We all engage in writing as part of our academic lives, yet it seems that it is something that is not discussed in the Academy as often as it should be. As I enter the final stages of my graduate program and writing my dissertation I realize that I have learned a lot over the past five years about the writing process. Firstly, I have learned that it is exactly that: a process. And secondly, it is a process for everyone. No one, not even the most seasoned writer, sits down at their computer (or with whatever they use to write) and within the course of a few hours, produces a final draft. Ideas take time to form, and writing itself is one of the best ways to play with, shape and develop them.

This realization has been incredibly liberating for me. In my first few years as a graduate student I was so stuck on the idea that everyone but me always knew exactly what they were trying to say and how they wanted to say it. The writing process feels so hidden, because almost all anyone ever sees are perfected, finalized and published pieces. Maybe some people do approach writing that way, but I have come to realize that I form my ideas through writing, and often times I do not even know what I am trying to say until I have written an entire paper or chapter (which is when I go back and write the introduction!)

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Race, Space and Symbol in South African Student Protests

Over the last year South African university campuses have been rocked by student protests. The nature and content of these struggles has been diverse, from opposition to rising tuition fees, to demands for the removal of colonial and apartheid-era statues, to labour rights for campus workers. Student protests are part of the historical grammar of dissent in South Africa, with the most notable example being the 1976 uprising by high school students in Soweto. Yet these student protests were different in a fundamental way. They were no longer directed at a racist minority regime, but at a party that led the liberation struggle and proclaimed a non-racial, non-sexist republic where opportunities would be available for all.

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