Discussing Decolonisation 2024/25: Decolonising Academic Writing with Dr Amita Nijhawan (UAL)

The third event in our 2024/25 Discussing Decolonisation series will be an in-person / hybrid workshop on decolonising academic writing, led by Dr Amita Nijhawan. More details below. 

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Summary:

Decolonising Writing 

In this workshop, we’ll explore and practice techniques that writers and storytellers use to make their writing come alive. We will explore evocative and descriptive writing, space and character, and metaphor and tension in the context of creative, performative, autoethnographic and academic pieces of writing. We’ll reflect on how these techniques help us disrupt hegemonic modes of academic writing and examine normative structures and hierarchies in which academic writing is published. These techniques challenge ideas of who gets to write, how they get to write and what they get to write about.

If you’d like to read more about this kind of work, here is one of my recent blogposts on Decolonial Dialogues.

Speaker bio:

Dr Amita Nijhawan is an Educational Developer at the University of the Arts London. Her Decolonising Writing project uses techniques more commonly used by creative writers and storytellers to disrupt hegemonic tropes of academic writing. She has created the Framework for Co-Creation and Student Partnerships and the Debunking Decolonising student resource to challenge university processes and rethink histories. She draws on her PhD in Dance Studies and her practice as a novelist to challenge how we write. Her writing can be found in Decolonising Dialogues, New Theatre Quarterly, South Asian Popular Culture Journal and various OUP and Routledge anthologies. Her novels are published with HarperCollins. Read more here: https://researchers.arts.ac.uk/1833-amita-nijhawan 

You can also read Amita’s blog post in response to the first event of our 2023/24 Discussing Decolonisation series here.

Booking info:

Booking for this event, and all events in our series, is available via Eventbrite.