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My best writing space: understanding academics self-professed writing spaces

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Higher Education
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Abstract and Figures

Research into academic writing has, in large part, focused on the fundamentals of how to write, and as a result, the understanding that writers require a space in which to concentrate on writing is not new. What is lacking, however, is detailed consideration of what influences writing practice and, specifically, an understanding of how scholarly writers construct their writing taskspaces. This paper explored how academic writers organised their best writing taskspaces. The notion of what constituted best was self-defined by informants. Informants submitted photographs of their best writing spaces, and these were analysed using a two-part methodology. First, the artistic and structural elements of the photographs were considered followed by analysis of the each photograph’s aesthetic qualities to determine the participants’ establishment and maintenance practices. The relationship between academic writers and their best writing spaces was categorised around construction and consumption themes. A typology of academic writers was developed from these findings. A four-part research agenda is proposed. This research extends understanding to include the informant’s role in creating writing spaces which may guide building and design, renovations and reallocation plans for departments and assist individual academics to improve writing productivity and effectiveness. The findings may also assist managers to ensure that employer-provided working habitats are conducive to effective writing.
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My best writing space: understanding academics
self-professed writing spaces
Angela R. Dobele
1
&Ekant Veer
2
Published online: 6 December 2018
#Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract
Research into academic writing has, in large part, focused on the fundamentals of how to
write, and as a result, the understanding that writers require a space in which to
concentrate on writing is not new. What is lacking, however, is detailed consideration
of what influences writing practice and, specifically, an understanding of how scholarly
writers construct their writing taskspaces. This paper explored how academic writers
organised their best writing taskspaces. The notion of what constituted best was self-
defined by informants. Informants submitted photographs of their best writing spaces, and
these were analysed using a two-part methodology. First, the artistic and structural
elements of the photographs were considered followed by analysis of the each photo-
graphs aesthetic qualities to determine the participantsestablishment and maintenance
practices. The relationship between academic writers and their best writing spaces was
categorised around construction and consumption themes. A typology of academic writers
was developed from these findings. A four-part research agenda is proposed. This
research extends understanding to include the informants role in creating writing spaces
which may guide building and design, renovations and reallocation plans for departments
and assist individual academics to improve writing productivity and effectiveness. The
findings may also assist managers to ensure that employer-provided working habitats are
conducive to effective writing.
Keywords Academic infrastructure analyses .Publishing .Qualitative methods .Promotion and
tenure .Higher education
Higher Education (2019) 78:345364
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0346-y
*Angela R. Dobele
angela.dobele@rmit.edu.au
Ekant Veer
ekant.veer@canterbury.ac.nz
1
School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
2
College of Business and Law, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... Tusting et al. (2019) found this too, along with a general blurring of boundaries between home and work in academia. Digging deeper, Dobele and Veer (2019) asked academics what their 'best' and preferred writing spaces were, creating a typology of 'co-opters', those who co-opt space designed for other activities, such as cafes or the bed; 'worker bees', who create writing nooks at work; and 'homebodies', who write at home. The authors note a tension around scholarly writing practices, where on the one hand there is pressure to publish, but on the other hand, the nature of academic working space is becoming increasingly uncertain as institutions re-structure departments and move to different ways to working (particularly now, in light of . ...
... The way they experienced affect in that space differed, and this demonstrates the importance of a sense of place within assemblages or economies of writing. As Dobele and Veer (2019) found, academics have different ideas of what makes the ideal writing space. The theory of affect concerns the body's ability to affect and be affected within spatiotemporal arenas (Anderson, 2014) and Katie described at length how colour, light, objects and social others influence her sense of space and her ability to achieve her best writing state. ...
... By building on and extending the work of others who have considered spaces of writing (Burford and Hook, 2019;Dobele and Veer, 2019) and the emotional politics of writing (Burford, 2017), in this article, I have applied a posthuman lens to the practice of writing. In doing so, I adopt a Baradian view of posthumanism drawing on the notion of affect and assemblage to consider writing as a more-than-human economy. ...
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