Monisha Bajaj  0:01
My name is Monisha Bajaj, I’m a professor of International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco. Well, I was going to read for you, on this question, a quote that I put on top of all the syllabi when I teach classes that students have to write projects in, and it’s by Gloria Anzaldúa and I can’t claim to have read all of Gloria’s works, but I really liked this quote. And I think she’s an amazing theorist and scholar. “Why am I compelled to write because the world I create in the writing compensates what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle, so I can grasp it. Finally, I write because I’m scared of writing. But I’m more scared of not writing”. So, I really liked that quote because I think it reminds students that we’re in a privileged position to be able to name some things and put them into writing and put it out there. And that it is scary. It’s scary for all of us. And it’s also amazing when you’re able to put stuff out and it resonates and someone from a different continent writes to you and says this really spoke to me, and I really found this to be useful. It’s also great to be able to reach many more people than come to your classes through your writing. So, I have a couple of favorite books that come to mind offhand, when you ask that question. One of them is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, that I read 20 plus years ago, and was just so formative in my thinking, and it’s just such a beautiful book. And then more recently, in the last decade or so I read a book called Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi that just-that book rocked my world, it was so good. And I can’t stop thinking about it. And so, I would say those two books are just beautiful, beautiful books that I always come back to and think about in terms of thinking about writing.

Dinur Blum  2:56
I’m Dinur Blum. I’m a lecturer in Sociology at California State University in Los Angeles. I think that really depends on what I’m writing. And if I’m excited to write about it. If it’s stuff that I’ve just got a brain itch, where I’ve just got to say, Oh, my God, I’ve got this line of thought I gotta write, I gotta write, that’s easy, right? I’ve got these ideas; I want to get words on screen. Unfortunately, 98% of the time, it’s not the case. There are times where writing is pulling teeth, it is just brutal, and so what I’ll tell myself is I’m gonna work on this for x amount of time. I’m gonna work on this for 20 more. I want to write 50 words, 100 words, right? Just get something out on screen. And I know that I might not use most of those 50 words that I might use some of them. I’ve learned to approach writing in a very unconventional way, and I’ve had to learn to be okay with being weird. And one of the things that I’ll do is I’ll record myself having a conversation about what I’m thinking of writing, and I’ll play it back for myself, and I’ll type out a transcript and sometimes just getting in that writing rhythm. You know, it’s why I don’t do voice to text. I’ll physically type it out, that gets me in that writing mood. Or sometimes I’ll type it out, I’ll be exhausted. I’ll go. I don’t want to think about this for a day or two. I come back and I go, Wow, I can’t use like three quarters of this but here’s a quarter that I can use. Now. I’ve got words on a screen. I’ve got ideas I can play with. But that comes as a result of being willing to be weird. You know, I’ve had conversations with people who were super in the know on what I was working on. I’ve had people where I said, Hey, I’m trying to work on this project. And I kind of limited it and said, What do you think of this? And so being unconventional, I think, sometimes goes a long way. And when it’s stuff that I really don’t want to work on stuff I don’t want to write then I just set a limit whether that’s a word limit or a time limit for myself. So, I’ve got a few and I know it’s a little bit of a laundry list. But I absolutely love working with Dr. Adam Sanford and Dr. Stacy Smith. I’m fortunate enough to have published with them on some of the social fallout COVID-19. They’re incredibly creative, they’re incredibly encouraging, incredibly motivated, they’re driven. I love working with them. There’s Caraway Carter who writes a lot of romance and I’m lucky enough to know him. I get to see the effort and the consistency that he puts in. I also love his blunt honesty, where he will read parts of his books to us and ask us for feedback. And he says, Is this okay? A couple other books and authors that I really enjoy. I’m right now reading Jonathan Mahler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning. And that’s looking at New York City politics in the 70s and at kind of the culture wars and looking at within the context of the Yankees, the Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin fight. So, it’s kind of putting those contexts against the racial background of what was happening in New York in the late 70s. And I think it’s really fascinating. There’s Dr. Alberto Testa, he writes about Italian football and fascism. And I always thought that that was super creative of looking at sport through politics, even though we know around the world that sport and politics are very closely linked. I think he does a really fantastic job of linking it to the supporter’s groups. And then the last author that I’m going to shout out is Dan Ariely; he’s a social psychologist. And what I love about his work is not only does he do a huge volume of studies, but he is able to convey his studies to a really wide audience, and he’s able to break down ideas into really easy, digestible pieces. And I think it makes everyone feel like they’re in on this knowledge with him. And I think that that’s the mark of a great writer is you’re bringing people into your ideas, and you’re making them feel like oh, yeah, we knew this all along with you. You just highlighted it for us.

Susan Robertson  6:36
So, I’m Professor Susan Robertson, and I’m professor of Sociology of Education, and also the co-editor in chief of Globalisation, Societies, and Education. How do I approach writing myself? I work very hard, in over a number of days, generating what I call a long abstract. And in some cases, because I’m also co-writing and we go with my co-writer, we would be maybe reading together adding bits to do with this extended abstract and the extended abstract might be about 1,000 words. But in a way through that, you’re trying to work out bits of the argument, which are not all going to be there. But at least, essentially, you’ve got a sense of where you might be heading. But then I keep returning to this abstract. And I might be re-phrasing or framing the title of the paper and adjusting the bits within that extended abstract as well. So, that’s a very specific way in which I find it really useful to work. It’s like a compass I keep on returning to and adjusting and finessing and so on. And I find it incredibly helpful to me just to keep a sense of where I’m heading. But it’s not a compass that doesn’t need adjusting. It absolutely does. I’ve got several favorite writers. And I love the way in which writers like Richard Sennett deal with very complex issues, but ways in which they speak to you not arrogantly through complicated language, but a language that enables you to be with him at a level of understanding. Raewyn Connell would be another writer I enjoy. What I like about Raewyn Connell’s kind of work is this amazing way that she’s able to grasp something of the inner psyche, along with the structural but also, again, not covering up the issue area with what would you say kind of writing that is unnecessarily complicated and complex? I think we do the research issues a disservice when we actually cover it up with the kind of language that makes it difficult for other individuals to access what is it that we’re trying to say.

Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar  9:00
I am Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar, and I am a lecturer in Education at Keele University in the UK. I’m not necessarily a good person to ask advice in terms of writing, particularly because I feel like my approach to writing really changes depending on the project. I tend to be the kind of person who does not do a lot of structured planning upfront, which I feel it’s helpful. I felt like it’s never really been part of my own process. I tend to read a lot before I can write something and for me, it’s taken some time to figure out when is the right time to stop reading and to begin writing. Yeah, I think reading is a good basis for writing. What makes someone a good writer is actually to be a good reader, not just to read a lot, but to read and try to identify what makes particular forms of writing work. So, not just reading for enjoyment, which is important and also reading for knowledge but also reading for understanding structure and rhetoric and all those kinds of devices, which are helpful here. So, I have some writers who are not necessarily academic writers who I’ve turned to in terms of inspiration, but also, I do have people who are academics whose writing I feel are inspirational as well. In terms of a non-academic writer, the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been, for me, a very influential figure in terms of my own thinking, particularly because of how she always tries to strike a balance between writing that is not necessarily complex but can still be very beautiful. And in terms of academic writers, I tend to gravitate towards the work of anthropologists who lean into the form of storytelling that enables writings to be much more richer and more descriptive. So, someone like Anna Tsing, for instance, comes to mind in terms of inspiration.

Krystal Strong  10:46
I’m Krystal Strong, I’m an assistant professor of Black Studies and Education at Rutgers University. It’s a struggle, but when I really sit and think about it, I think the thing that has been most impactful to my writing, is writing in community. And I think back to grad school, and even right now, I’m always a part of a writing group. And even if we don’t read each other’s writing, which is a great reason to have a writing group, we’ll just gather together, whether it’s in person or on Zoom and write together. And so, when you don’t feel like writing, you look to the person next to you who was in the trenches with you. And it’s just the most encouraging way to take what is often a very isolating experience and make it social and collective. And these are my favorite writers slash scholars, and so it’s their writing that I’m motivated by, but also the model they offer for how to live a principled and meaningful life as a scholar. So, one is WEB DuBois, who has to me one of the most incredible political and intellectual trajectories of anyone I can think of. Just the scope of his work, the scope of his intellectual evolution, I draw so much inspiration from him. Another person is Walter Rodney, who is this kind of similar figure in terms of like the scholar, organizer, intellectual, and someone who kind of offers us a model for how to be a scholar of and with the people, which is very important to me. And then I’ll say Toni Morrison, who I just think is one of the most honest and creative and just beautiful writers who models in her writing, but also in her life, just this kind of creativity and boldness that I can only aspire to.

Ezequiel Gómez Caride  12:40
I’m Ezequiel Gómez Caride, I’m working at the University of San Andres in Argentina, and I’m an assistant professor. In terms of writing, something that I’ve found useful is that they have writing groups. They kind of share with other students their advanced ideas, their new writings and that stuff. I found that that’s very useful for them and, and for the process. I was very moved during my graduate students with distinction, Bourdieu’s book also with Jean Anyon’s Radical Possibilities, also with Foucault. The books that made me think or made me feel a lot; those are my favorite books.

Alison Milner  13:14
Hello, my name is Alison Milner, and I’m an assistant professor at Aalborg University in Denmark.

Will Brehm  13:19
How do you approach your own writing?

Alison Milner  13:21
I’ve learned a lot over the years in terms of my own writing. I used to be a little bit of a perfectionist, I used to feel that I had to read every single article that was available on the topic before I could even put pen to paper. Now I’m much better at skimming, I understand that the writing process is long and can take many twists and turns. And actually, strange as this may seem, I do actually enjoy peer review feedback because I actually like the opportunity to improve my work. And I like the opportunity to think about my work differently. I don’t necessarily always agree with everything they say. But I do see that as part of the process. So, yes, I think writing is very much an individual activity about finding voice but having other voices kind of offer advice is also really helpful. As a new researcher, as a beginning researcher, I found it quite difficult, initially coming from teaching to engage with a lot of academic texts. And what I did first and this could be seen as another tip for potential researchers is and it was actually advice given by my PhD supervisor was to actually watch the YouTube videos of these particular academics talking about their research, and then engaging with their texts afterwards. And because it became much more lucid, then. It became much clearer what they were saying in their academic, formal language of a text. Having listened to their paper presentation, a conference, or their dialogue with another academic. So, I think one person I would say who I enjoy reading now having seen him talk is Bob Jessup and his work on governance. And I think I definitely recommend that if there are certain social theorists, political theorists, who are quite complex in their writing, to actually look at other media for sources of inspiration and for kind of access into them. Because that really helped me. Other than that, I would say my PhD supervisors both actually were very good writers in their own way and taught me a lot about how to connect with different audiences through their writing. So, I think that’s something as well to think about when you choose your PhD supervisor, is there somebody whose work you enjoy reading and that you connect with on that level?

Lachlan McNamee  15:39
I’m Lachlan McNamee, I’m an assistant professor of political science at UCLA and a lecturer of Politics at Monash University. In some ways, as a graduate student, I started out mimicking poor writers, like writers in my own discipline, who maybe use a lot of jargon, during a lot of literature reviews and hide their own arguments. It took me some time to develop my own confidence in the course of writing my book, to actually mimic the style of the writer who I liked. And who I liked the most was James C. Scott, and I found that people responded very well to writing in an engaging way, in a way that, in some ways we’re trained not to do as academics, but I think there’s so much scope to improve the quality of academic writing by almost pretending like you’re writing for a semi-popular audience and how would you grip them? Well, you do so through anecdotes, you do so through juxtapositions, you do so through just wit. I think that there’s so much scope to do that and people respond really well to that. My favorite writer is James C. Scott. He is a political scientist but also an anthropologist. He’s written a lot about state building in antiquity, and I in some ways consciously mimicked his style, which is very engaging, very witty, and very acerbic. I guess you could say he is clear who he disagrees with, as well as who he agrees with. He doesn’t do comprehensive reviews of what everyone said. He makes pretty clear arguments in contrast to scholars who he disagrees with. So, I always found his writings, especially about the emergence of early states, just always fascinating and always easy to read.

Zeena Zakharia  17:20
Hi, I’m Zeena Zakharia and I’m an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, in College Park. I have a love-hate relationship with writing honestly. I love to come up with the ideas and then I hate to get them down. And I think that that’s been a fraught relationship for a very long time for me. But I’m also quite disciplined so I make myself write. I have scheduled writing blocks that I stick to, and then I try to write in community whenever I can. Yeah, I think trying to write with others really helps. I’m inspired by a range of scholars, think about bell hooks and Edward Said, both of whom had such layered writing and genres, and who really spoke to who I am as an educator, but also as a researcher, and they were bold, where others couldn’t be. And I think that that’s really allowed me to aspire to greater amounts of boldness, perhaps, you know, maybe when I’m more secure.

Derron Wallace  18:20
My name is Derron Wallace, I’m an assistant professor of Sociology and Education at Brandeis University and a research fellow at the Center on the Dynamics of Ethnicity at the University of Manchester. Writing for me is very, very hard, Will. You know, oftentimes people will say, “I took a while to write a book”. Writing this book took me nearly 10 years to write because I find writing so hard, and I felt as though I was writing across traditions, across bodies of literature, and across national contexts. How I approach writing, interestingly enough, I start first by reading. I have to convince myself that I first have something to say. That there is something that others have not yet said and as I realized that others haven’t said it, I find it sort of crescendoing passion as it were to be clear about what I think needs to be said. So, that’s first where I start, is by, I suppose, listening to the literature and being clear about where my voice fits in. Once I have that, then I spend a fair amount of time crafting my abstract be it for the chapter or the book, or for the article. And that’s my roadmap. And so, I spend a lot of time trying to get that right. The sad part though, and I would say to folks don’t do this, is that I am more of an editor than a writer and so if I step away from my desk for an hour, I don’t just hop back in and start writing, I edit everything I’ve written before. That is not good practice. You need to free yourself to write and just trust yourself that in the end, you will come back to it and do it well. I think that’s one way that the perfection of graduate school and always needing to get it right has hampered me down right. And I think if you can free yourself just to love writing, just to love reading, make it an everyday practice, right? That you don’t feel like everything you write needs to be published. Yes, some things you write will be terrible, that you will be embarrassed that you wrote it, and it’s okay. And some things you write, you will shock yourself, you will be like, did I write that, or did Arundhati Roy write that? You will be moved, sometimes, by a line or two you might write. Nevertheless, it’s really important just to free yourself and give yourself the opportunity to write because I think that’s how we become better writers, better thinkers, better analysts of social life. So, I love that sort of lush moving prose of our Arundhati Roy, to the powerful poetry of Louise Bennett, who’s a Caribbean literary figure, the sort of accessible work of Stuart Hall. Those are just some examples of the kind of writing that moves me. I think, for me, what’s been helpful as an ethnographer is to read widely. And by that, I mean, let me be more precise, don’t only read social science research. Read literature, read sacred texts, it’s okay to pick up the Bible, the Koran, it’s okay. It’s okay. It is all with that moving lush prose that you can learn from. The craft of storytelling, you can learn that across religious traditions, right? So, that for me is really crucial, is to read widely. So, I suppose instead of who’s your favorite writer, I’m just moved by my favorite works, right? And I start there, and I pay attention to what they’re trying to teach me about storytelling. And then I try to hone that in a way that’s authentic to who I am, authentic to the locality of where I’m at or where I’m doing my work in and write from that place. I mean, I dream one day to write like someone like Arundhati Roy, or a Stuart Hall and that will probably never happen. But I am finding my own voice in the process. I’m finding my own style by suturing together, the sort of literary traditions of Louise Bennett, who writes in Caribbean quote unquote dialect that was long stigmatized and dismissed, and I write like that in my book, because that’s how the parents I spoke with, that’s how they speak, and I put that in my traditional academic work. Sometimes some lines may sound like poetry, as I’m describing what a community looks like, that’s entirely fine. It feels authentic to what I experience because that’s what I’ve documented in my field notes. And other elements are analytical and political in the sort of traditional Stuart Hall, and all of that makes me who I am. And I would encourage each writer to sort of, don’t pay attention to your favorite writer, necessarily find your favorite works and become your favorite writer.

Sharon Walker  22:28
I’m Sharon Walker, I’m a lecturer in Racial Justice in Education at the University of Bristol. I often have a fear of writing. And so, I approach it by doing it because I have moments where I put it off, and I put it off, because I’m afraid of what the pen will look like on the page, so to speak. And so, I think that I approach it by doing it. And even if it comes out as gobbly goo, it does not matter as long as I’m writing. So, I think that’s probably key for me. My favorite writer? If I’m thinking about academic writing it is Stuart Hall. I often think if that man was still alive, I would bother him every single day. I absolutely love him. I love him not only because he shares a background and experience in common with my parents; i.e. from the Caribbean, came to Britain at a similar time, kind of lived that experience of Britain at similar time as them, so I love him for that. And I love that he saw the world and he looked at it analytically. He asked questions about it and he gave us things. Even though he’s no longer here, we can read those things and use those things to help us to understand lots of questions about the world, so I very much love him.

Ian Cook  23:32
My name is Ian M. Cook. I am the director of studies of OLIve, which is the Open Learning Initiative, which is based at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. I think like many people that have moments of writing that were really uncomfortable. Like a real slog. Like especially the last chapter of PhD, which I finished writing in 2015, I didn’t enjoy that at all. But over time, I found quite a lot of joy in writing, especially now. And that’s by trying different methods and different styles. So, sometimes it really is me just sitting down and writing lots of notes on a piece of paper and then typing them up. Sometimes I’ve done co-writing where we co-authors, we basically sat down for one hour, and said, Okay, we’re going to write on this topic, you write for 20 minutes, then we swap the text and you write for 20 minutes, then we swap the text and you read for 20 minutes. And we end up with a common piece of writing that we produce in an hour where we’ve all worked in different sections. And we don’t know who’s is who’s. And that was a great way of doing writing as well. It’s a great way of getting ideas down on the page that no one feels ownership over. So, that’s like another way of doing it. Or sometimes it’s just nice to write in a way that’s I guess a bit more standard, which is sitting with your field notes, or your readings and just assembling things together. I also did a super interesting thing for one of the chapters of my PhD semester during 2013 or 2014 or something where I put all the things I wanted to put down on not post-it notes, but these library index cards, and then I just sat and arranged a whole thing to try and find a different way of structuring the ethnography that I wanted to write, rather than just following the standard thing. So, I guess with experimentation. So, I don’t have a favorite book, but I just thought, what’s the last book I read? And so, if that’s okay. The last book I read was The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasnahorkai, and it’s a book by a Hungarian writer, and I liked it a lot. And the reason why I liked it a lot was because maybe pertinent to the conversation that we had; it showed the inept stupidity of leaders when faced with crises.

Michele Schweisfurth  25:36
Michele Schweisfurth, Professor of Comparative and International Education at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. I have to force myself. I really have to force myself. I give myself lots of talking to, and I do all sorts of avoidance things, and then I talk to myself again, and then I sit down. And I, more often than not, I kind of work out what I’m trying to argue. I try to start with a narrative, and then kind of infill from there. So, from the narrative, create a structure, from the structure, sort of think about what data or what literature is going to support this, but I do tend to start, I guess, I think of it almost as storytelling, but not fiction, obviously, I hope. But I’m always looking for that narrative thread through the research. And then when I’m writing, that’s what I’m presenting and using the rest as vehicles for presenting that. My PhD supervisor was Robin Alexander and I still think that his book, Culture and Pedagogy is not only a brilliant piece of research, but it is so beautifully set out. I would challenge anyone to sit down and read it cover to cover. But it is an extraordinary piece. And he writes very, very well. That makes a really big difference actually.

Michael Crossley  26:57
Michael Crossley, professor of Comparative and International Education at the University of Bristol in the UK. Somewhat like an artist does in a way, I don’t do it in a mechanistic way. I sort of craft it. I know this through agonizing experience, but I like to fine tune whatever I’ve written. Often narrow it down. Don’t narrow it down often, make it more accessible. But the struggle is to do that without losing the complexity of the issues that you’re dealing with. So, I find it more of an artistic process. And the fine tuning that comes at the very end is absolutely vital. No one favorite because they keep changing over time. The same with books, they keep changing over time. But when I was an undergraduate student doing comparative education, I was inspired by a lecture by Philip Foster, who was visiting the UK from the United States and Foster was, for me, a very clear speaker, very clear thinker, and very clear writer.

Janelle Scott  28:04
Janelle Scott, I’m a professor at UC Berkeley. I am a tortured, miserable writer, and I hate it. So, I enjoy having written, but I don’t enjoy writing. And so, I think the way I approach it is I now know that about myself, I remind myself that I’m going to be so happy in the end. And I try and suffer through writer’s agony because I know what’s on the other side brings incredible euphoria and satisfaction. I’m going to go novel instead of academic. My favorite book is called Mama Day by Gloria Naylor and it is a beautiful book about a young woman, Coco, and her relationship to her ancestors in the Georgia Sea Island. And it’s about I think, very much African and African American ways of knowing that are mystical and spiritual, and also quite real. And I find myself returning to that book over and over again since it was published.

Mario Novelli  29:14
My name is Mario Novelli. I’m a professor in the Political Economy of Education at the University of Sussex, in the UK. I think with great difficulty and trying to carve out space in an academic world where we’re so full of so many tasks that it’s difficult to carry something for a long enough period to feel like you’re getting your brain around it. So, carving out time, I think, is really important. And yeah, I guess I’m kind of one of those that says try to get the stuff out on paper because at least you can discuss it. Don’t hold it just inside your head. So, try not to get stuck in the middle when you realize that you haven’t read enough, keep going, and then come back and try to resolve those issues, but don’t break the flow. But to be honest, I do find it really challenging these days to carve out that space, and kind of keep looking for this mythical several months that never appears where I’ll be able to do everything that I haven’t done, but you know, increasingly recognizing that that will just never happen. So, I just have to keep getting up early in the morning.

Will Brehm  30:27
Who’s your favorite writer, and why?

Mario Novelli  30:29
I have several. I love Walter Rodney and I love him because he embodies in his writing and the topics that he explores what I would say is this kind of activist-scholar that is really engaged in social transformation. And I find that consoling, even if it’s aspirational, rather than something you can ever reach. Then I like Nancy Fraser a lot. I like Nancy Fraser because I think that she does the groundwork in making us think about difficult issues and try to conceptualize them and pull them together and provides frameworks for us to move forward and think about stuff. So, if I think over the years from the recent book Predatory Capitalism this year, but work on “leaning in feminism”, there’s a whole range of issues, I think, that Nancy Fraser has brought in that really help us to conceptualize. And then I think there are a group of scholars that I’ve really been influenced by Edward Said, Arturo Escobar, Boaventura de Sousa Santos. And I think what I like about them is both the complexity of their thinking, and also their capacity to point you towards different wisdoms, different knowledges, different canons, and make you realize that. They’re all operating in a sense on that kind of border between economy and culture, and opening up these issues, and I found that challenging and difficult, but really important in terms of framing issues and thinking about things.

Natasha Warikoo  32:10
I’m Natasha Warikoo, and I am Stern professor in the Social Sciences, in the Department of Sociology at Tufts University. Writing is a very painful process. I think, for most people who write when I’m kind of, in the middle of say, the first draft, it’s really about outlining and forcing myself to take the first two hours of the day, and I tell myself, okay, 1000 words today. And the other thing that I wish I had done early in my career, which seems obvious, but maybe isn’t obvious, because I didn’t do it was to sort of say, What’s the genre I’m trying to write in? And let me go find like five examples of this and kind of reverse outline it, right? What do they do in that first paragraph, in the first chapter, if it’s an article in the introduction, and what are the different sections to really kind of demystify the sort of polished end piece. What does that look like? And when you do that, you see there are patterns, right? Not everybody’s writing follows the same pattern. But there are certain elements that are always there that you kind of intuitively get that that’s why you like this, or why you found this compelling, but unless I really kind of codifying that, I think can be extremely helpful. So, that’s the advice I would give to people even though it took me a long time to start doing that. You know, I’ll talk about academic books. I like academic books that are very accessible, and that kind of illuminate something that was not necessarily obvious to begin with. So, one thing that one book is kind of a classic is Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods where she develops these ideas of concerted different kinds of parenting by class, concerted cultivation versus the accomplishment of natural growth. What I love about the book is that it’s very readable. And she kind of takes these two really complex ideas but makes them very intuitive but not in a reductive way. So, in the text, she’s always talking about, well, this, but here’s a different piece of data that says something slightly different, but you really sort of come away with a complexity. And yet there are key ideas that emerge as well. That’s very hard to do but that’s one model that I have for what I strive to do.

Francine Menashy  34:24
My name is Francine Menashy, and I’m an associate professor at OISE at the University of Toronto. I approach my writing by I have at least three writing blocks a week first thing in the morning for about an hour, hour and a half. And I usually take a little bit of time every couple of weeks planning what I’m going to do within those writing blocks. I stick to them, I put them in my calendar, they are a meeting with myself, and nobody can interfere with that. Sometimes they move around from day to day but there needs to be at least three of them. I also have a little writing group with two old friends, and we meet every other week and we set goals for ourselves for the next time that we’re going to need. We just do these little meetings over Zoom. But I’m a big believer in you make a schedule, you stick to it, and nothing can come in the way of it. It’s gotten easier as my kids got older, though, I have to say that. Make a schedule, stick to it. Also, remember that writing includes reading, that writing includes making outlines, that writing includes editing. But for sure, make sure you carve out time as a meeting with yourself. It is the most important thing in terms of getting your thesis completed. And so, don’t let someone say, hey, come organize this conference with me but you can’t do any writing for three weeks, well, then maybe you should say no. So, I’m gonna probably go a little bit off in this answer and I’m gonna pick a science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. She’s my favorite fiction author but she’s really my favorite author in general. I think that science fiction is half of how I think about the world differently is by reading sci-fi novels and watching sci-fi movies. And her work, in particular, really lets you see the world in a different way. And she had that great quote, which I’m going to completely mess up. But she had a quote, that was we all think we can’t change the world. I think she was talking about capitalism, and that everything is inevitable. But we also thought that way about the divine right of kings.

Judith Landeros  36:41
My name is Judith Landeros, I am a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin studying Curriculum and Instruction in the Cultural Studies in Education program. How do I approach writing? In the phase I’m in now, I like to not have an expectation. You know, like, go in knowing that I am writing but everything I’m thinking isn’t just coming from me. It’s coming from ancestors, it’s coming from guidance around me, and that it’s this connection in order to be able to write down the stories that are meant to be told. And sometimes that doesn’t go very well with academic writing because you have to write by a certain deadline and do all these things. But there’s moments where you just have to write and get it out, but I feel like that’s when I enjoy it the most when I approach it that way. I have so many favorite writers. I feel like I have the poets, the creative writers, and the education researchers but I wrote them down beforehand so I wouldn’t forget, or I don’t know where they’re at now. But I was thinking of Leon Simpson, it really impacted me as a grad student, bell hooks and the Grande. And there are many more.

Luis Urrieta  37:56
My name is Luis Urrieta and I’m a professor of Cultural Studies of Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. The conditions have to be good for me, they have to be right. I can’t sit down and write for 15 minutes. I’ve heard people say, oh, yeah, 30 minutes, and then another 30 minutes, and I need a sustained block of time because I need to get into what I’m going to do. I feel that the energy that we put into the work, the emotion, the spiritual part of that has to be there because we put life into these inanimate things that then become animate. And that’s the energy, that’s the life that others will receive. And so, I have to really prepare myself mentally, physically, spiritually, to sit down and do this. So, when I’m really busy with a lot of other things that distract me, that’s not a good time for me to write. I share similar interests with Judith obviously, Sandy Grande, Audra Simpson. There’s newer younger writers that I really admire; Floridalma Boj Lopez, David Barillas Chon. Senior writers from the Global South; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Aura Cumes, and others.

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Mentioned Resources

God of Small Things

Homegoing

Adam Sanford

Stacey Smith

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning

October Men

The Fight

Football, Fascism, and Fandom

Richard Sennette

Raymond Cornell

Chimamanda Adichie

Anit Singh

W.E.B. DuBois

Walter Rodney

Toni Morrison

Radical Possibilities

Bob Jessop

James C. Scott

bell hooks

Edward Said

Louise Bennett-Coverley

Stuart Hall

The Melancholy of Resistance

Culture and Pedagogy

Mama Day – Gloria Nayla

Nancy Fraser

Arturo Escobar

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Unequal Childhoods

Ursula K. Le Guin

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 

Sandy Grande

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