Writing economies and economies of writing

Abstract

Our introduction to the Exchanges section unpacks the two terms, writing economies and economies of writing, as well as previewing the subsequent nine papers included within the section. We contend first, that the economy cannot exist until it is first written about – ‘writing economies’. Here a variety of dates have been suggested as to its first written representation, from roughly 2500 hundred years ago to a mere hundred years. Second, we argue that the pressures on academics to write – ‘economies of writing’ – have never been more acute than now and bound up with the neoliberalization of the university.

Writing geography: Teaching research writing and storytelling in the discipline

“…For instance, between 2005 and 2018, Chinese student enrollment in US universities skyrocketed from 10,000 to nearly 150,000 (Ma, 2020: 2–3). Chinese students are in the words of sociologist Yingyi Ma “ambitious and anxious.” They are driven to excel in their graduate studies, but face the reality, as do economic geographers whose native language is not English, that “English has become hegemonic within the global academy” (Dufty-Jones et al, 2022: 377; Hassink et al, 2019). But they are worried, too, that as non-native English speakers in an English-speaking university, whether they have the necessary writing competence to finish MA theses and PhD dissertations.…”