Location: Ponderosa Commons Oak House, Room 2012
Open to the public. Light refreshments at 12:45pm.
‘There’s magic in the room’: Can post-humanism help us understand dissertation writing bootcamps?
Dr. Sue Starfield, Professor of Education, UNSW Sydney
While writing bootcamps and other literacy events aimed at encouraging the productivity of doctoral students have become popular in recent times, little research has been carried out to investigate why it is that putting 60-odd PhD students in a room for two days would be so enthusiastically embraced by the students. In my talk, I will draw on Bucholtz and Hall’s (2016) claim that ‘the body is imbricated in complex arrangements that include nonhuman as well as human participants (p. 186) as I seek to understand not only the role of ‘literacy events’ such as the bootcamp but also to look more broadly at how support for doctoral writing can be ‘distributed’ in neo-liberal times.
Dr. Sue Starfield is a Professor in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney where she teaches courses in qualitative research methods and thesis and dissertation writing. Her publications include Thesis and dissertation writing in a second language: A handbook for supervisors (with Brian Paltridge, Routledge, 2007); Getting published in academic journals: Navigating the publication process (with Brian Paltridge, University of Michigan Press, 2016) and Ethnographic perspectives on academic writing (with Brian Paltridge and Christine Tardy, Oxford University Press, 2016). She is regularly invited to run workshops on thesis writing and writing for publication both locally and internationally, runs thesis writing bootcamps for doctoral students, and has facilitated writing retreats.
This talk will take place on the traditional, unceded, and occupied territories of the Musqueam people.