Writing Joyishly

Writing is “a means of producing, codifying, transmitting, evaluating, renovating, teaching, and learning knowledge and ideology in academic disciplines. Being able to write in an academic style is essential to disciplinary learning and critical for academic success” (Fang, 2021). In this session, visual culture educators working with practice-based students will explore academic writing in environments where student literacies are primarily visual, spatial and material. For these students, writing can bring to the fore “an epistemological tension between the distinct worlds of text- and object-based research practices” (Biggs and Büchler, 2012: 231, in Gimenez and Thomas, 2015: 34). We query how to inhabit this tension and expand the role of written practices in art and design scholarship.

This two-hour collaborative workshop will examine the overlaps and interfaces between art historical writing and the art school as a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary exchange. Participants and convenors will respond to a series of provocations around ideas of threshold, liquidity and fluidity, examining the importance of care and hope. Through guided activities, we will consider writing as bodily and visual, drawing upon contemporary art and design practices to reframe art historical writing.

The convenors’ approach develops an ongoing research project entitled Ways of Writing, which so far has produced workshops, two special issues for the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (2022 and forthcoming), and a session for On Not Knowing: How Artists Teach (The Glasgow School of Art, June 2023).

Session Convenors:

Rebecca Bell, UWE Bristol

Clare Johnson, UWE Bristol

Rachael Miles, UWE Bristol

Jenny Rintoul, UWE Bristol

Joanne Lee, Sheffield Hallam University

Julia Lockheart, University of Wales Trinity Saint David