Writing in Concert as Creating a Shared World

There are many impediments to writing in the academic context for graduate students and faculty alike. For grad students, there are often teaching responsibilities that seem more important than one’s dissertation; of course, learning to teach is itself incredibly time consuming. For faculty, there are increasingly unmanageable workloads, which tends to push scholarship down the list of priorities—committee work, administrative work, and shifting institutional values away from the importance of research all contribute to the difficulty of accomplishing one’s own writing goals. Things shifted over the course of my own faculty career, including the rise of assessment reports for classes, departments, and programs; the loss of compensation for chairing and directing departments and programs, though of the course the work still needed to be done; the emergence of the scholarship of teaching and learning, which was a great development, but which tended to position research without a direct link to teaching as self-indulgent; higher teaching loads and bigger classes; and the list goes on. On top of all that, writing is necessarily solitary work—only I can do the actual writing I so want to do—and that makes it hard to maintain one’s motivation. When time is at a premium, when one’s work is increasingly devalued, and when one’s desire flags, what is one to do? I would like to propose the not-so-radical idea of joining or creating a writing group. Not only do such groups offer concrete support and accountability, they can also help us revalue our work. To explore that notion, let us consider Hannah Arendt’s work on collective action from The Human Condition.

One of the central questions of The Human Condition is to understand how we might disrupt dominant cultural norms—the operations of which Arendt refers to as “the social”—in order to bring about something new. She was concerned about the tendency of any social order to impose conformity on its members by insisting on a narrow set of norms; those who act outside those norms are often punished in various ways, both large and small. How can these forces of conformity be challenged, she wondered? Her basic answer is through collective action. We can consider any social movement as an example: the Civil Rights movement challenged racist practices that prevented people of color from living as they would choose, the Women’s Movement challenged limitations on women’s life choices, the gay rights movement challenged homophobic assumptions and practices, and so on. Each of these movements made changes to dominant cultural norms and practices, opening up greater equality for those on the margins, though much still needs to be done. We can use Arendt’s phrase “acting in concert” to describe these movements—people from different backgrounds and with different experiences came together to achieve a common goal. These collectivities created new ways of being for those who participated in them, and they did indeed change some of the cultural norms used to justify oppression, altering the broader world of which they were a part. I want to suggest that something similar can happen when we share the writing experience—a revaluation of writing itself can emerge from the simple act of working with others.

When I was a graduate student, imposter syndrome was my biggest writing challenge—I wasn’t convinced that I had what it took to do good work, with the dissertation as the most obvious proof of “good work.” I allowed my teaching responsibilities to expand beyond what they should have, taking up most of my time and leaving little time to write. And the pay was so poor as a TA that working for money was a year-round requirement, so focusing on the diss over the summer was not any more feasible than during the school year. And yet I finished. How, you ask? By writing with a good friend. We took for granted that we would get our work done together, which somehow made it seem more possible to get it done. Rather than focusing on my faults and shortcomings, I focused on writing. And thus the writing happened.

When I started my first tenure-track job out of graduate school, new faculty were assigned a mentor to help us adjust to faculty life and to the specific values and practices of the institution. This particular institution had a fairly high teaching load, and I was worried about accomplishing my scholarship goals. So when I asked my mentor how she was able to work on her scholarship, and she basically said that she reserved summers for her own research, I was profoundly disappointed. I thought not only that she valued her work differently than I valued mine, but that the institution must as well. I wasn’t wrong. While we were expected to engage in scholarly activity, and it was a requirement for tenure, publishing was pretty low on the list of expectations. For my first couple of years, I barely worked on my research during the academic year, because it really is hard to maintain your motivation by yourself, and teaching and service are very time intensive. But it turns out I was not alone. As I met colleagues who shared my goals and values, we began getting together to write and read each other’s work. It was transforming. The more we met, the more I made time to meet; the more we wrote, the more I wanted to write. The more feedback I got from them, the better I wanted my writing to be. Together, we created spaces that revalued writing as meaningful and as central to our lives as faculty.

We didn’t only revalue writing for ourselves, we modeled its importance for others, fellow faculty and students alike through teaching and public presentations. Scholarship often makes its way into the classroom, sometimes in ways we don’t anticipate, as when I used pop culture texts in Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies classes while I was working on my book (Power and Marginalization in Popular Culture, McFarland Press, 2020); members of our group frequently presented our work on campus as part of the Faculty Colloquium Series, which made visible the value of our work beyond our group. In both cases, we were able to create new ways of thinking about what’s meaningful and important about a college/university education, contributing to a shift in the institutional culture. As with collective action, writing in concert with others works, then, by creating alternative worlds, we might say, among the participants. And that alternative can then have effects far beyond the participants themselves. Not necessarily, but potentially.

We can thus understand our writing as contributing to a shared world, one that we always have the capacity to influence in ways we cannot always foresee or anticipate. Writing in concert is thus akin to acting in concert: we contribute to the creation of new ways of being that can transform the worlds of which we are a part. The stronger the forces around us that work to close down that work, the harder it is to create these spaces, but the more important it becomes to find ways to come together to create them. How we are together creates our common world. We can interrupt it as it given to us, we can create alternatives to its dominant version, we can act together to disrupt and recreate it.