WRITESPACE

Writing and publication are inextricably entangled with an academic career. Yet finding time to write and to develop productive writing practices is very challenging.  In 2018, in my capacity as the Athena SWAN project manger at Birmingham City University, I ran a one-off writing event for female academics to coincide with International Women's Day.  I called it WRITESPACE, intending as I did, to provide a protected space for writing, simply by booking out a room and inviting female academics to come and write for a couple of hours, with email and phone switched off.  WRITESPACE proved popular.  I repeated the event a couple of times that year and in 2019. 

If finding time and concentration to produce high-quality academic writing pre-COVID was challenging, the additional pressures of the pandemic and lockdown made it doubly or triply so.  According to a rapidly expanding literature, female academics were  particularly disadvantaged in this respect, due to the burden of homeschooling, household and caring tasks.  Working at home myself, in 2020, I moved WRITESPACE online, creating a five week structured programme including a Check In/Check Out feature where participants could meet and chat about their writing at the start and end of the sessions. 

The online version of WRITESPACE also proved popular, so much so that from July 2020 onwards, it became a twice weekly facilitated, virtual space where female academics from across the university knew they would find others writing.  Here's what participants say about WRITESPACE:

“WRITESPACE has been a revelation to me, supporting my writing but also forcing me to reflect on my own work and writing habits.”
​“WRITESPACE has enabled me to protect time for writing in my calendar and to clear my head of any other concerns/deadlines whilst ‘in the room’.”

​Fast forward a year: in June and July 2021, I ran three WRITESPACE Summer Sessions for staff and PGR students at BCU. These  structured sessions offered time to write AND explore timed writing, processes of writing and writing habits. Limited to 25 per session, places went like the proverbial hot cakes and all sessions had waiting lists.​
​

THIRDSPACE 

I built on my experience of facilitating writing spaces with THIRDSPACE hosted by SRHE in early 2021.  Like WRITESPACE, THIRDSPACE offered a facilitated framework of protected space for productive academic writing over a six-week period. The intention was to create a temporary writing community of female academics beyond institutional and national boundaries; to share resources, challenges and successes and to enable participants to review their approach to academic writing and learn from others. I'm undertaking a small-scale research enquiry into participants' experiences of THIRDSPACE - see Space to Write.