Doing academic writing differently: a feminist bricolage

Abstract

1 Rachel Handforth BA (Hons), PGCertRachel is a second year PhD student at Sheffield Hallam University. She is undertaking research which explores the career aspirations of women doctoral students, focusing on how these might change over the course of the doctorate. Her study aims to identify the factors which contribute to individuals' career aspirations, explore how disciplines and institutions influence individuals' aspirations and examine perceived barriers to women pursuing a career in academia. This qualitative study utilises a combination of interviews, diary entries and other narrative methods within a longitudinal study. Participants have been recruited from across disciplines and from two northern universities with different research profiles and priorities.Rachel also works as a part-time research assistant in the Humanities Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, conducting research on representations of gender in popular music. Her research interests include auto-ethnography, identity and narrative research methodologies.Carol is a reader in the Sheffield Institute of Education. She is involved in research leadership and staff mentoring within the department. Carol is convenor of the Higher Education Research Group, which includes specialist research themes on higher education policy, student engagement, access and transitions to higher education, pedagogic research, and research-informed teaching and learning.Carol is a further and higher education research specialist. Her current research interests include feminist approaches to education, gender and materiality, spatiality and education. Carol co-leads the Material Feminisms Reading Group, in conjunction with Professor Jessica Ringrose, (Institute of Education, London) and Professor Maggie MacLure (Manchester Metropolitan University). The reading group is an international constituency of material feminist scholars working to develop theoretical and empirical research collaborations. If you are interested in joining the group please contact Carol.Carol collaborates in research on, and theorisations of, student voice, students-asresearchers and student engagement. She is a member of the SRHE Student Experience Network and is involved in the RAISE network. AbstractThis article emerged as the product of a collaboration between two individuals at different stages of our academic careers, one a beginning researcher and the other a senior academic. Written as an experimental bricolage, the article weaves together two main threads to chart our engagements with feminist research and with writing practices, both of which we envisage as forms of feminist praxis. The red thread explores feminist research as a continuous accomplishment in which becomingfeminist is enacted through our different research narratives. The green thread employs diffraction, as an experimental practice to undo the normalised practices of academic writing by weaving together various kinds of texts. In its entangled quilting of the red and green threads, the article foregroun...

Making a bricolage: An immanent process of experimentation

“…Writing with full attention to all materialities, as well as challenging the rules and structures of writing, made sense in a new materialistic framework. The immanent ethical approach makes it possible to bricolage the different data at hand and let thoughts happen in writing (Handforth and Taylor, 2016).…”

Alterethnography: Reading and writing otherness in organizations

“…It is part of the feminist writing differently wave, represented by such rich, growing and emancipatory literature, recently represented in methodology of social sciences by publications such as Nina Lykke’s (2014) edited book proposing feminist and intersectional writing methodologies linking academic and creative practices. In educational sciences, Rachel Handforth and Carol Taylor (2016) propose a feminist academic writing as academic experimental bricolage and defying writing for the panoptic gaze of indexes and measures. In organization studies, this wave contains a plethora of important texts, represented by texts such as: Christopher Grey and Amanda Sinclair’s (2006) delightfully narratively illustrated call for writing critically as well as idiosyncratically and reflexively; Heather Höpfl’s (2011) glorious celebration of women’s writing, defying homologation and a refusal to conform with phallogocentric order; as well as special issues of major academic journals such as Management Learning , guest‐edited by Sarah Gilmore, Nancy Harding, Jenny Helin, and Alison Pullen (2019), intended as building resistance to hegemonic ‘scientific’ norms of writing and containing a variety of very different texts, aimed to inspire and create space for female difference.…”

Disturbing the AcademicConferenceMachine: Post‐qualitative re‐turnings

“…This has been done not to hide but to enact and foreground our cyborg writing practices as a mode of ‘pollution’ which undercuts presumptions of ‘perfect communication’ (Haraway, , p. 552). For example, Lather and Smithies' () polyphonic text Troubling the Angels and, more recently, the collaborative biography work of Davies and Gannon (), and Handforth and Taylor () feminist bricolage, all make deliberate efforts to pollute and ‘mess up’ standard codes of layout and text. More broadly, variants of textual ‘messing with a purpose’ have also been undertaken by post‐qualitative researchers (Benozzo, Koro‐Ljungberg, & Carey, ; Löytönen et al, ), by radical philosophers (Deleuze & Guattari, ) and by new material feminists (Barad, ).…”