"Perhaps I was drawn to the language of exhaustion because I was travelling to my doctor for a health control on the 4th of November, the day when I read the book and made this first diary note. Or maybe Frichot’s book is so thought provoking in the way it unexpectedly awakens the reader’s attention to the richness of theoretical language that exhaustion offers that it speaks to many readers who will feel that they have waited a long time for this book to be written?" This article is Mona Livholts reading of Hélène Frichot's book Creative Ecologies. Theorizing the Practice of Architecture published by Bloomsbury 2019. The article is published in the inaugural issue of Reading Writing Quarterly (December 2019), where Professor Jane Rendell invites two writers to read each other’s work, to explore ways of ‘reading writing’ that practice ‘reviewing’ from a situated perspective and re-write the genre and texture of the ‘critical review essay’.

Under #metoo postade kvinnor inom socialt arbete sina berättelser om sexuella trakasserier och våld under hashtaggen #orosanmälan. Artikelns syfte är att synliggöra, analysera och reflektera kritiskt kring de motståndsberättelser som kom inifrån socialt arbete och vad de gör med bilden av socialt arbete som akademiskt ämne och profession.

This creative and original book develops a framework for situated writing as theory and method, and presents a trilogy of untimely academic novellas as exemplars of the uses of situated writing. 

It is an inter- and trans-disciplinary book in which a diversity of forms are used to create a set of interwoven novellas, inspired by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory and literary fiction, along with narrative life writing genres such as diaries and letters, memory work, poetic writing, and photography. The book makes use of a politics of location, situated knowledges, diffraction, and intersectionality theories to promote situated writing as a theory and method for exploring the complexity of social life through gender, whiteness, class, and spatial location. 

It addresses writing as an inter- and trans-disciplinary form of scholarship in its own right, with emancipatory potential, emphasising the role of writing in shaping creative, critical, and reflexive approaches to research, education, and professional practice. It is useful for researchers, teachers, postgraduate and PhD students in feminist and intersectionality studies, narrative studies, and pursuing interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities, social sciences, design, and the arts to inspire a theory and method for situated writing.

Writing is an act of translation and transformation, an embodied, material and spatial activity through which researchers’ design and shape knowledge. Thus, researchers are story-tellers with signatures beyond the page and the computer space. Currently, narrative genres of writing research are emerging as a wide and heterogeneous field of work that often interacts with visual culture such as photography, paintings, theatre and film. What are the potential possibilities of narrative life writing genres to contribute to shape creative and performative art based practice for scholars across the arts, design and science? In this keynote I explore epistemological questions about the author as creator and story-teller in art based practice and suggest that the expanding heterogeneous field of narrative life writing genres, where the written word often interacts with visual culture, is useful as a catalyst for such practices. Inspired by auto/biography- and life writing, feminist theory and literary fiction, I promote the idea of artistic self-portraiture where the writer at work perform their writing selves in specific situated locations, power relations and inter/disciplinary contexts. I will draw on my specific work with the untimely academic novella, to explore the relationship between the body, material objects and textual shaping, the ethics and politics of poetics, self and another.

Professor Jeff Hearn has been at the forefront of research on men and masculinities, and has published extensively on sociology, social policy, gender, sexuality, violence, organisations, management, and cultural studies. His current research focuses on men, gender relations, organising and transnational patriarchies, along with violation and memory work. He is professor at Hanken School of Economics (Finland), University of Örebro (Sweden) and University of Huddersfield (UK). He is the co-editor of NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies [http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rnor20#.VpT7kFK3Qkw], and recently published Men of the World (Sage, 2015) [https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/men-of-the-world/book236923] and co-edited the special issue of NORMA, ‘Men, masculinities and young people: North-South dialogues’ [http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rnor20/10/2].

The interview was conducted with Associate Professor Mona Livholts, Linköping University (Sweden) on 16 September 2015 in Norrköping, Sweden, as a RAW Dialogue Chair, which constitutes a stage, a space, to enter into conversations about ‘writing’ as an intellectual practice that shapes and re-shapes knowledge. RAW, The Network for Reflexive Academic Writing Methodologies, was founded in 2008 by Livholts. It is an international interdisciplinary research network, which constitutes a meeting place for researchers, teachers and academic professionals interested in all forms of writing methodologies.