It has been a year since my article “Doing Academia Differently” was published. Writing the article had been a transformative experience. It inspired me to design my workshops Creative Writing for Academics, and it pushed me to start working as a creative entrepreneur, staying in touch with academia, but from a different position.
While the article was finding its audience, and after I had had the chance to experience the power of making space for researchers to explore their writings in new ways, I experienced one of the most severe winters of my life and had to shut down for a couple of months.
Reading Katherine May’s Wintering helped me make sense of that experience. I loved the way she pays attention to nature’s capacity to adapt to extreme colds. From afar, it then may look as if nothing happens. But when we look closely, we see all kinds of activities going on: burgeons have formed on bare branches, still closed, but ready to burst open when spring comes. Hibernating animals breathe differently, lower their body temperature, change their chemical balance.
Nature doesn’t stop when winter comes. It adapts; it transforms.
So did I, breathing through extreme nauseas, dizziness, and complete exhaustion that came with pregnancy. I entered a subterranean kingdom, a kingdom where time and space function differently. A kingdom of silence. A kingdom of untold stories.
The extremes of being in a woman body is full of silences and is such an untold story. An untold story that I may start writing, bit by bit, as I resurface into the world. Revisiting what it means to be a mother; revisiting what I do for work; finding new patterns in search of equilibriums.
What’s coming up:
And so, we are now a year later, as I gear towards a new season of creation.
These are a sample of activities I look forward to, and I hope to meeting you along the way:
New workshop for grant applicants:
Thanks to a request from Université Saint Louis Brussels, I’ve developed a new writing workshop for grant applicants. The workshop provides tools to uncover the research proposal’s narrative, one of those tricks that tilt a proposal on top.
Sounds like something for you or for your institute? Contact me!
Creative Writing for Academics:
I’ll continue providing series of workshop Creative Writing for Academics, with sessions already book for various institutes at the University of Amsterdam, Nijmegen University, and Queen Mary University of London.
These workshops make space for researchers to explore a diverse and creative pallet of writing styles in their academic writing practice. They are open to all disciplines, and welcome researchers from PhD students to full professors.
Following on previous projects on Social Dreaming, I’ll contribute some of my poems to an artistic exhibition on Social Dreaming held at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. Details will follow, but I already know that the opening is on November 17, 2022.
Loosening the Boundaries of Our Disciplining Writing Practices
Today is the day that my article has been published with Millennium, Journal of International Studies. I love Millennium for their honesty, for their curiosity, for their openness to invite poems and stories on the page of an academic publication. I love them for having embraced my invitation to loosen the boundaries of our academic writing practices, and to publish work (here: my work) that plays with the boundaries of genre, looking for spaces where that which has been repressed is allowed to speak.
This publication is for me an experience of possibilities. I wrote it with my whole self, speaking and writing with generations of scholars who have invested creative practices within their scientific work. The writing felt like a liberative practice that honoured the legacy of generations of women and men who, time and time again, have revealed an honest story of knowledge production and knowledge writing. As Donna Haraway reminds us:
It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.
Donna Haraway
Writing the article has been a break-through in my own practice, and paved the way for designing my workshops Creative Writing for Academics, as one possible way of enacted the invitation that the article puts forward:
“To allow a more diverse and creative pallet of writing styles in the academic writing landscape, with the aim to recuperate the reparative in both research and writing by allowing the creative to be present, visibly present.”
Marie Beauchamps
You can book a workshop for your research group, institute, faculty, transnational research activities, and everything in-between! Contact me.
In my own story, the article has been a catalyst to transition from working within the structure of the academia to continuing doing academia differently as a creative entrepreneur. My hope is that the stories contained in the article will inspire you to craft your own way of creative practice within your work.
Whether you join a workshop or not, I would be delighted to hear how creativity finds its way in your work. Stay in touch!
It was such a joy to reconnect with friends and colleagues after the holiday. But I was saddened to witness how many of us are filled with apprehension to start the new academic year. The holiday hasn’t been short, but the pandemic weights on everyone’s shoulder, and there is so much to do.
I have an antidote: Inject creative practice into your work.
When I designed my workshop Creative Writing for Academics, I noticed how injecting creativity into our research and writing practice yields power. It brings fun and joy into our work. It unleashes energy to write. It connects us with our intimate stories. And it brings us in touch with the profound questions that inspired us from the start.
Yet making space for creativity isn’t easy. And this is why I keep offering these workshops:
To make space for you to experience a moment of writing where hands-on exercises not only boost your writing practice, but also make you experience your research and writing in a fresh, honest, and relational way.
Join us! During this two-session-workshop, you will invite sensory details on the page, turning your research into a vibrant text where data, concepts, and theories become characters who take you on a whole new journey.
Most
people believed it was a legend because the climate was not a favourable one for snakes. Grass snakes had
been reported, but no more. Fact is, there was a big, beautiful, black snake
down the hill. It dwelled under the stone by the birch tree, about halfway on
our way to the local supermarket. Its body was as thick as a human leg and long
enough to bridge both sides of the river. Its eyes were always wide open; the
pupil a black diamond amidst a pool of white gold. Stories went that the snake
had appeared after a giant eruption of the old volcano. At first an
infinitesimal living residue left by an outburst of magmatic energy, it had
remained secluded under a stone, they said. It grew at the infinitely slow pace
of sedimentation, the weight of time accumulating onto its body, leaving traces
of scales behind. Others said that a collusion between the earth and an
asteroid had projected it onto the valley, adorning it with that uncanny
metallic scent and auras of unknowings.
The first time I saw it—it was that afternoon when
Mom had sent me to go get some eggs for dinner—the snake hissed like an old
locomotive approaching the highway. Its hooked tongue pointed in my direction,
swift as lightning, unpredictably sharp. I stopped, freezing, trying to
resemble the stone in the grass. I fixed on the horizon, concentrated on my
upper lip, fearing to feel the air dripping off my nose, scared to release a
sound, to betray the beginning of a motion. And yet I sensed the surrounding becoming
sheer movement, like a waterfall submerging the stone that I had become,
testing me, covering me up with the fluidity of time passing, with the beating
noise of my blood against my chest, moving up my face, knocking at my temples,
fleeing down my spine, numbing my limbs.
I heard it sigh—at least I thought I did—and I
watched it crawl, meandering in the dust, folding and unfolding like a thick
rubber rope twisting under pressure. It came to face me, daring, yet keeping
its distance, and we both stood there. I lost track of all familiar references;
my thoughts disappeared into its black dress. When I roused myself, the snake
had coiled back under the stone, the rhythm of its lungs barely visible under
its spine cage.
I went to the supermarket to get those eggs and came
back home with the sight of the snake fixed in my memory, like those tiny green
beads of goosegrass always sticking on my socks. The next morning, I saw myself
returning down the hill. No sound of a hissing locomotive this time. But as I
peeked at the interstice between the rock and the earth, there where shadows
grow, I saw the round edge of its body, pitch-dark, immobile. And instead of
feeling my blood turn warm and cold at the same time, this time, I felt the
urge to pet it, just like I would pet a cat jumping on my lap. It’s not that
the fear was gone, no, but the fear I now experienced no longer seemed to
originate in the sight of the reptile, but rather in the recognition of its
existence in my own world. Somehow, the mere sight of it gave me a feeling of
homecoming. It was like we shared a deep-seated similarity; like it had
preceded me; like I could have not been here without it lying under its stone
in the field down the hill nearby the birch tree.
Weeks, months, years passed. It became a habit to go
down the hill and check on the snake’s dwelling, peeking under the stone,
holding my breath and yet feeling this urge to see its body curl out of its
hole, to gaze at the black diamond in its eyes, to imagine holding its head in
my hands and whispering in its ears. Most of the times, the snake would lie
like a massive leathery rope collapsed upon itself, its head buried in-between
two lumps. When it was awake, we would stand there, face to face, daring each
other. It happened that it reached me with its hooked tong, jerking me out of
my admirative state. But I soon discovered that keeping my gaze straight into
its eyes would make it coil back under its stone, its wilderness shrinking like
ice in warm water.
It was on one of those mornings that I started to
notice the change. The scales around its neck had lost their metallic quality,
now lying soft like down with hints of coniferous patterns, like feathers. I
went back home, made tea, drunk water instead, started to make breakfast but I
was not hungry. I sat there, confused and mesmerized, listening to the wind
passing by the window, waiting.
It
was twilight when the sound of its whinnying made the entire valley quiver and
I saw it rise: a giant black, winged horse, reaching for the stars.
It was an afternoon in early summer 2019, in Amsterdam. We were celebrating our teaching program’s fifth anniversary, just as much as I was saying goodbye to those colleagues who had been my community for the past four years. Sipping a beer and laughing at students’ jokes, I was chit chatting with a colleague who happen to be a judge at the Dutch supreme court—one never just happens to be a judge, but one happens to have a colleague who is a judge at the supreme court. My colleague judge was asking me about my new research project that had just started in London.
“I’m
writing about denaturalization law,” I answered.
I’ve
been writing about denaturalization law for years now, so that has become my
primary reflex answer. Judges do know what is at stake in denaturalization law—they
know the stakes of the principle of equality before the law; they know what is
at stake when depriving someone’s of their citizenship rights; they also know
that security is a tricky topic that can sometimes bring democratic ideals into
shaky grounds. I saw in his look that he was interested and that he understood
why such a topic was worth years of research. That look changed slightly when I
added: “But denaturalization is more a tool to write about something else. What
I really do is to show that law and politics are driven by affect and emotions.
And then I also want to make the argument of fiction as methods of inquiry and
communication within the academia…”
Where
most of my academic colleagues up to now had reacted positively intrigued—who
wouldn’t want to see creativity come back in an institution of knowledge and
education?—I sensed that my colleague judge had his doubts about it.
“Stories
are dangerous,” he said, pausing. “Stories are a huge problem in law, making it
very difficult for judges to know where to draw the line—a line that they do
have to draw.”
I agreed. Stories are dangerous. But the point is, stories are as old as human communication. So, I told my colleague judge that my starting point was precisely to see the dangerous potential of stories. In fact, it was when studying such a repressive measure as the deprivation of citizenship, studying the logics that has justified practices of denaturalization throughout history, that had made me realize the power of imagination when it becomes captured in language. Repression is indeed based on stories. Stories drive people to do the most horrific things imaginable. Wars; Slavery; Genocides. These are based on stories. Stories make people believe that some people are better than others. Worse, stories make people believe that some people are more human than others.
The
arguments in stories are no rational arguments. Instead, the arguments are
anecdotes, figurative language—metaphors in particular—framing…all ingredients
needed to make a good story.
Stories
are nothing new in law and politics. They’ve always been there. And yes, they
are dangerous.
So,
we better learn acknowledge their presence and learn to recognize them.
“You’re
very right,” said the judge.
I’m certainly not the first to claim that law and politics are intricately related to storytelling. For instance, Ronald Dworkin is famous for understanding the law by means of the chain novel metaphor. Central to his law philosophy, the chain novel metaphor represents law as literature, but then literature of a specific kind. It is a collective work, for which novelists write in chain, each continuing the chapter of the previous writer. This means that each writer must interpret the work of their predecessor, as well as add their perspective on the story unfolding. It is no free writing though: in Dworkin’s vision of law as a chain novel, each writer must respect the logic and the chronology of the work as a whole. No postmodern experiments, not poetical interludes—at least, not in the guidelines.
What
I like about Dworkin’s vision of the law as a chain novel is that it makes
salient how the law is “doing language,” to speak in Toni Morrison’s terms. “We
die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may the
be measure of our lives,” she reminds us in her Nobel Prize Speech. When seeing
the law as a chain novel, we must pay tribute to the work of interpretation
that goes hand in hand with working with the law. And we must acknowledge the
creativity involved for laws to be drafted in the first place.
Yet
there is another layer to acknowledging the stories that make our laws and drive
our politics. Uncovering stories is one thing, writing stories is another. But
they go hand in hand; they are the two sides of the same coin. If stories yield
power, they are also empowering, and perhaps even more so when they are stories
about power relations, of those power relations that require a story to uncover
them.
More than any academic text will ever be able to do, stories yields the potential for readers to relate to the complexity rooted in the politics of law, or in the law of politics. Elizabeth Dauphinee’s book The Politics of Exile is a wonderful example. Her “meditation on the aftermath of the war on Bosnia” does a tremendous job at plunging the reader into the context of the war and its atrocities. No academic text could have made us experience what is at stake in circumstances of life and death, such as when a man deserts an army. Dauphinee’s creative text does. It is a page turner in which the narrator makes us feel the soldier’s line of flight. But The Politics of Exile does more than that. It also makes us feel how complex it is to write on the aftermath of war in the first place. Because, how could one possibly write about the aftermath of war when not having experienced war in the first place? Can war be known to those who have not experienced it?
Dauphinee’s work makes us feel the existential negotiations of a writer who feels the urge to expose power in its most destructive form. Just as it makes us feel the writer’s anxiety when negotiating their ability and responsibility to find truth. The voice examining the aftermath of war necessarily needs to remain plural, and open for radical transformation. Creative writing is indeed a great tool to achieve such complexity without having to name it complex.
More than any juridical comment will ever be able to do so, stories allow for people like you and me to understand what is at stake in norms of belonging and repression. Stories empower the dispossessed to connect, to speak, to speak-back. Stories are paranoiac as much as they are reparative, to speak in Eve Sedgewick terms. They are paranoiac because they seek the (com)plot behind our governing norms. But a good story is always stronger than its plot, yielding layers of connective emotions that make us practice our job at being human. And that is what makes them reparative.
A
researcher and writer at the crossroads, I love to run the extra mile to uncover
the political stories of our pasts and futures.
I’ve
created this blog as a platform for crossing genres and languages. It is a space
to share the bits and pieces of research that often find no way out; the bits
and pieces that lead to the bigger story, whether mine, or yours.
The
blog is part of my research project titled “Mobilising Affects: Withdrawal of
Citizenship and Politics of Security” that has received funding from the
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie
Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 839538. The project takes place at the School
of Politics and International Relation, Queen Mary University of London.
In
a nutshell, my research project focuses
on the mobilization of affects in politics of security and the withdrawal of
citizenship. I draw on historical cases as the basis for evaluating possible
consequences of intensified withdrawal practices for regimes of citizenship
today. I combine
archival research with working affect across the social sciences and art
practices.
