by Kate Carruthers Thomas
At SRHE’s Annual Conference 2025, I gave a paper which argued that community, collegiality and care were key elements of the writing groups and retreats I’ve facilitated for female academics. I used Massey’s heuristic device of activity space to foreground interactions of gender, space and power in those writing interventions. I concluded that in embodying community, collegiality and care, they can potentially be seen as activity spaces of resistance to the geographies of power operating across universities and the individualised, competitive neo-liberal academy.
Academics must write. Written outputs are one of the principal means by which academics enact professional capital as experts and specialists in their disciplinary fields (French, 2020 p1605). Scholarly publications are central to individual and institutional success in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF). Writing does not automatically or quickly lead to publication and just finding the time to write productively presents challenges at all career stages. But as Murray and Newton state: ‘the writing element of research is not universally experienced as a mainstream activity’ (Murray and Newton, 2009 p551).
Applying Massey’s analytical tool of activity space: ‘the spatial network of links and activities, of spatial connections and of locations within which a particular agent operates’ (2005 p55)to this context, we can imagine the UK HE sector as an activity space shaped by networks and power relationships of disciplines, governance, financial and knowledge capitals, metrics and institutional audit. We can also imagine the sector’s 160 universities as nodes within that wider activity space. Massey coins the term ‘power geometry’ to describe how individuals and groups are differently positioned in relation to different geographies of power in activity spaces. For example, UK universities are more or less powerfully positioned across a spectrum of elite, pre-1992 and post-1992 institutions.
We can also consider each university as an activity space, with its own spatial networks and connections shaped by the wider sector and by regional and local factors. These are enacted within each university through systems of management, workload and performance, creating the environments within which ‘agents’ – staff and students – work and study. Academics in more senior ranks, with higher salaries and research-focused roles are more likely to produce scholarly publications (McGrail, Rickard and Jones, 2006). And while the relationship between research and teaching is a troubled one across the sector, this tension is exacerbated for academics located in post-1992 institutions, many describing themselves as ‘teaching intensive’. Research and publication remain strategic corporate priorities for post-1992s, yet workload allocation is heavily weighted towards teaching and pastoral support.
So, in relation to academic writing and publication, academics are also differentially positioned, more and less powerfully, within the activity space of the university. One of the key factors influencing that positioning is gender. If we scratch the statistical surface of the UK HE landscape we find longstanding gender inequality which is proving glacially slow to shift. Women form an overall majority of UK sector employees in academic and professional services roles but 49% of academic staff, 33% of Heads of Institution and 31% of Professors are women (Advance HE, 2024). They predominate in part-time, teaching-only and precarious contracts, all of which play a role in slowing or stalling academic career progression. These data cannot be seen in isolation from women’s disproportionate responsibilities for pastoral and informal service roles within the university and gendered social roles which place a burden of care for family, household and caring on many women of all working ages.
Academic writing groups and retreats are a popular response to the challenge of writing productively. They can ‘be a method of improving research outputs’ (Wardale, 2015 p1297); demystify the process of scholarly writing (Lee and Boud, 2003 p190), and ‘enable micro-environments in what is perceived of as an otherwise often unfriendly mainstream working environment’ (ibid). Groups and retreats are often targeted at different academic career stages and/or specific groups within the academic workforce. Since 2020, as critical higher education academic and diversity worker, I have run online writing groups and in-person writing retreats for female academics at all career stages, most employed at my own post-1992 university. Over 140 individuals have participated in one or other of the interventions and I used a range of methods (survey, interview, focus group) to gather data on their motivations, experiences and outcomes.
The combined data of all three studies show that the primary motivation of every participant was to create protected space for writing, space not made sufficiently available to them within working hours, despite the professional expectation that they will produce scholarly publications. In this context, the meaning of ‘space’ is multi-dimensional: encompassing the temporal, the physical and the intellectual. The consequence of the interaction of protected temporal and physical/virtual space is intellectual space, or what was referred to by several participants as ‘headspace’ – the extended focus and concentration necessary to produce high quality scholarly writing (Couch, Sullivan and Malatsky, 2020) .
When I launched the online writing group (WriteSpace) during the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown, MS Teams software enabled the creation of a virtual ‘writing room’ and a sense of community over distance. Socially-isolated colleagues sought contact with others, even those previously unknown to them. As lockdown restrictions eased and remote, then hybrid, working arrangements ensued, the act of writing alongside others virtually or in-person remained an important way to engage in a shared endeavour. The in-person residential retreats in 2023 and 2024, followed Murray’s structured retreat model (Murray and Newton, 2009 p543). Participants wrote together in one room, for the same time periods over three days. They also ate, walked and socialised together.
Each of the writing interventions were multi-disciplinary spaces for female academics at all career stages, including those undertaking part-time doctoral study. Whatever their grade or experience, no one individual’s writing was more important or significant than another’s. These hierarchically flat spaces disrupted the normative power relationships of the workplace and the academy. On the retreats, additional practices of goal setting and review in pairs encouraged ongoing reflection and exchange on writing practices and developing academic identities.
Many participants experienced the facilitation of the groups and retreats as professional care – a colleague taking responsibility for timekeeping, recommending breaks and stimulating reflection on writing practices. The experience of care was extended and heightened at the residential retreats because all meals were provided in a comfortable and peaceful environment and no household chores were required. This was particularly significant in the context of women’s social roles and conditioning to care for others.
Viewing these writing interventions as activity spaces situated within the wider contexts of the university and the UK HE sector foregrounds interactions of power, space and gender in the context of academic writing. The writing interventions were not neutral phenomena. They were deliberately initiated and targeted in response to a gendered imbalance of power in the academy and the university. They were occupied solely by women. They intentionally prioritise temporal, physical and intellectual space for writing over teaching, administrative, pastoral, household and domestic responsibilities. Within them, academic writing becomes a social practice and a common endeavour.
The interventions do not remove longstanding and pervasive gender inequality across the UK sector, change gendered social roles, resolve the tensions between teaching and research in the contemporary neoliberal academy, nor increase workload allocation for academic writing. However, in embodying community, collegiality and care they can potentially be seen as activity spaces of resistance to the normative geographies of power operating across universities and the wider sector.
Kate Carruthers Thomas is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Gender at Birmingham City University. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing on educational, sociological and geographical theories and methods. She also has a track record in creative research dissemination including graphics, poetry and podcasting.
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