‘Shut Up & Write’ relaunched at BCU

By Annette Naudin on January 11th, 2016


Are you struggling with writer’s block and procrastination?

As a student, do you sometimes feel you lack motivation?

Do you want to improve your writing skills, critical thinking and come up with new ideas?

Well look no further! BCMCR is launching in partnership with PGRStudio a new series of ‘Shut up & Write’ sessions to start on January 24, 2016. What makes this group different from other groups you might have signed up to before is this one is designed and managed by PhD students. Our main aim here is to create with you an intellectual environment where we can all come together to work and discuss common challenges that we all face as postgraduate students. So we have decided to keep the structure quite flexible to accommodate your needs.

We hope this reading and writing group will help you enhance your writing skills, while giving you, at the same time, the opportunity to critically engage with one another’s work. This group also aims at helping you discuss issues around your work, share concerns about the challenges that you are facing and set up short and long-term goals that you can achieve, while making you critically think out of the box as a researcher.

There are a number of benefits to being a part of this reading and writing group:

  • You will develop the habit of writing for reasonably short periods of time, which can help you better understand your own “peak” hours of effectiveness
  • You will learn how to become more accountable for your progress goals
  • You will develop the skills needed for a supportive intellectual community, such as giving and taking feedback, and creating original work
  • You will be able to benefit from and contribute to new resources, perspectives and ideas
  • You will get the opportunity to prepare and practice for conference presentations, which can help iron out all of the kinks
  • You will improve your time-management skills

Our first session will take place on Wednesday 27th January 2016, at 1pm in P233 (2nd floor, Parkside building). Our group will meet monthly and each session will last three hours. At these monthly gatherings, we’ll engage with a curated list of texts, including but not limited to excerpts from PhD student work, staff and researchers publications and major theoretical texts in the field. We’ll spend two hours writing as a way to respond to and critically engage with these texts. At the end of each session, we’ll share what we’ve written, evaluate each other’s work and reflect collectively on the main issues we all faced through the writing process.

Here’s an overview of our first two sessions in 2016. It’s important you read the book before the writing session, so please come prepared!

January 27th 2016 Room P233 Time: 1-4pm

Patrick Dunleavy’s ‘Authoring a PhD. How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation’ published by Palgrave in 2003.

The book is available at BCU Curzon library and in PDF online here.

February 24th 2016 Room P233 Time: 1-4pm

Ann Gray’s ‘Research practice for cultural studies: ethnographic methods and lived cultures’ published by SAGE in 2003.

The book is available at BCU Curzon library and in PDF online here.

Please sign up on Eventbrite here or email us on ShutupandWriteBCU@gmail.com to join. Also, look out for our live-tweets on #Shutup&WriteBCU about this series in the next few weeks.