September 21 2023

Friederike Landau-Donnelly

^{Collemacchia, July 27, 2022
Berlin, August 4 and 5, 2022
Nijmegen, September 20, 2022
Airplane, September 23, 2022
Toronto, September 26 and 27, 2022
Nijmegen, January 31 and February 1, 2023
Kolkata, February 7 and 8, 2023
Berlin, February 27, 28, 2023
Berlin, August 29, 2023}

Introduction: Writing differently

This text cuts through the weeds of academic writing traditions, and proposes to reflect (again) on where and how we write about space. In the context of spatial disciplines such as human geography, planning, urban studies, landscape design and architecture, I argue, the places from where we write matter in the production of academic (or not-so-academic) knowledge. While this text is not a methodological guide to creative methodologies for spatial analysis¹, it offers a poetic exploration of how places of writing reinforce the embodied experiences of writing in and about space. On the one hand, this reflection gestures towards approaching the writing about places with more caution, care, reflexivity and attunement. On the other hand, it mobilizes awareness on how writing in specific places affects access, process(ing) and interpretation of empirical data to be gathered in the writing environment, be it proximate or far away.

This text attempts to write itself into the conversation of how to do research otherwise – and wonders where this positionality takes us in terms of transgressing academic practices off the meritocratic, quantified, managerialized track of academic knowledge production. It offers two trajectories to write differently: First, by dedicating attention to the affective dimensions of writing, and its concomitant irritations, frustrations, exhaustions, excitements and exhilarations. Second, by embracing the inherent multiplicity engrained in writing with creativity, humour, and honesty about the many different states researching bodies go through while writing in and about space and place. With this, I hope to loosen our fingertips, and take our wrinkled foreheads and tired eyes away from conceptions of how knowledge in academia is conventionally produced through writing.

Knife Going in: Places of writing in academia

Academics constantly write – we compose student assessments and check boxes in forms, we scribble down reviews, commentaries, we write books, articles, chapters ourselves, we send thank-you-emails, no-thank-you-emails, observational field notes, comments in the margins of papers and conference programs, to name but a few. Besides the fact that we write, the ramifications of where, how and why we write remain much more ominous. Hence, in the following, I drag the weird postures, pressures, pains and pleasures imbricated in writing to the fore. This pushing-pulling-shoving exercise starts from the only sincere point of departure, which is my embodied sentient writing self.

The fuel to initialise this journey is the #PoeticAcademic. The function of this self-invented semi-protective, semi-exposing hashtag is to produce and push out poetic thoughts that gathered within me long before this label existed. In the early moments of COVID-19, many seemingly immovable boundaries indeed moved: People started working from home, people became unable to work (mind you, some of them are still struggling to return to pre-pandemic work speeds and expectations due to the largely unacknowledged sickness of long COVID), people explicitly started to talk about overwork, burnout, insecurities, and different types of care work they had to provide for children, elderly family members, neighbors, and pets alongside their gainful employment.

In this convoluted space of crumbling certainties, which I spent at my parents’ small-town place in the middle of Germany, I wrote a lot of poetry and took the leap of publishing it under/as #PoeticAcademic.² The desk from which I wrote was my older brother’s childhood desk, where I found myself staring at a tiny star carved into the wood, a childhood doodle from decades earlier. That desk now felt grotesquely small, as if I had not only physically but also intellectually outgrown this setting. That desk, that room, that house pushed me back to the sheltered yet sweet childhood I had passed. Yet, this spatial environment – all-too-comfortably providing calm alongside the global state of emergency and crisis – also challenged me to connect with my writing about community public art in Vancouver, the place where I conducted a post-doctoral fellowship, coming to an abrupt halt due to the first lockdown. In Vancouver, by contrast, I had written in cafés, sipping Matcha Lattes, nibbling overpriced vegan sweets, looking at local art, taking in the diffuse soundscape of coffee machines, chatter and clinking cutlery.

The place I wanted to, and was supposed to, write about during lockdown however was thousands of kilometers away again. My “feel of the place”³ was off. Instead, I was bound to a place in which I was safe, but not in sync with what I was writing about – Diasporic artists and activists, pressures of gentrification and upscaling of a supposedly dying neighborhood, contested public space and the reconciliatory efforts to mend past and present marginalization via publicly commissioned public art.

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Writing in different places, writing place differently

Fast forward. Sitting in the dry heat of Collemacchia, Italy, almost two years later. I am on my first artist residency, dicussing Publishing as an Artistic Practice. I am surrounded by lush trees, and far away from the routinized processes of writing – the churn to stay focused, the parallel skimming of too many PDFs. Instead, we are surrounded by empty sheets of real paper, no big screens. Here is where this text begins to take shape. The writing almost goes too fast, it squirts out like a self-obsessed journal entry. I am painfully aware of the multiple privilege to be so vulnerable and reflexive about my writing practice; I have the liberty to explore ideas, let them simmer, let them grow and expand, but also to abandon them. While my privilege also manifests spatially (i.e., having a stable and quiet place to work, steady internet access, EU-internal freedom of movement etc.), other spatial privileges were cut down – no international field research for now, no conference travels, no writing in cafés.  

my milky brain pours itself onto pages
meetings of shades of dark white 
the blissful relation to a blank page
the terror of it, too 
don’t you want touch the surface of an article? Don’t you want to cradle its words? would you wear this text? 
a one-column text is almost too much for me

When it comes to the spatial implications of writing, situations and senses of distance and proximity intermingle. I have encountered writing as a dance between externalization (i.e., writing it out) and internalization (i.e., frantic note-taking and jotting down what I saw, tasted, smelled, was reminded of, had questions about, smiled at). By externalizing multi-sensory impressions, I realize that my data is hugely more encompassing than the official points of data collection I cite in methodology sections. For example, by bringing in not-quite-such-academic sources such as novels, scraps from magazines, postcards picked up in bars, music lyrics, or by citing observations from restaurant visits, bus rides, street festivals. These everyday observations complement and enrich my scattered thoughts. By carefully attending to, archiving and creatively resassembling fragments that can both precede and excede the official timeline of academic text production, the becoming of text appears more as an exercise of maturation, stitching, soaking, waiting – it’s like a sourdough finally taking off. Methodologically speaking, a more spatially-attuned way of writing can bring about new ways of structuring and evaluating data. It considers embodied experiences of places (whether we explicitly conduct research in them, or not) as part of the data that shapes academic observation about places, spaces and environments.

Moreover, the places from where we practice academic writing (or any type of writing, for that matter) influence the textures, depths, rhythms, speeds, levels of sincerity, irony, humour, hope, precision of writing, its length, style, tone. Where you write might even affect which audience, reader or public you have in mind for your writing. Movement or stillness matter; quiet, noise, light matter. The sound of a milk frother or high-pitched police sirens in the background create different habitats of writing – is it preposterous or liberating to write in public? Do you feel empowered by the hipster crowd in a fancy café, or do you get distracted by Instagrammable surroundings? Are you in a rush, or slightly ashamed of what you are writing? Are you hungover, on your period, about to see an old love affair and nervous whilst writing? Do you write more hastily, lazily or succinctly in transition? I personally have found my writing of the past years often being influenced by movement and transition as I often write on trains, where I spend a lot of time commuting between personal and professional worlds. How often have I cobbled together notes from my phone, notebooks, back pages of novels to finally end up in the smooth surface of a copy-edited text… Sometimes, the ruttling train grants me phases of flow and deep focus, sometimes, it pushes me to finish a sentence quickly, as I yearn for a full stop before my laptop needs to be packed up, and I have to leave this moving space of writing.

your weight gets detached 
from the ground when you float into text
words seep, evaporate
writing from smoke

economies horizons of scale
scaling scaring scathing words
where does your writing end? 
exit strategy 
exist strategy
slinging words 
sharing your silence
sharing your scream

letters are ladders to climb into this world nobody should have ever claimed to understand
imposterous preposter
I am brewing up an ethics of letting go

Again, environments affect writing: Rain carries me away from the present, sunshine pulls me away from my screen, the cold makes me dance in front of my screen. I recently put sugar on a page because I wished you would have eaten my words. How do texts speak? How many words do you use until you have said what you wanted to say? As Marie Beauchamps points out “the problem with academic texts is that too often, they have become alienated from the stories that propelled their writing in the first place.”⁴ While the language of alienation might be a bit too strong for a non-grumpy and/or non-Marxist (yet, very fitting for a grumpy Marxist), the lack of connection, or lack of embodiment, in writing is quite pressing. Don’t we need to acknowledge our bodies whilst writing? Isn’t it only this body that could write this text? While this bodily awareness might not be the only problem with academic texts, Beauchamps’ words resonate with my own practice of writing: I sometimes let myself be distracted; I sometimes do not let me myself be distracted, and force myself to write; sometimes, I do not always write concisely, I sometimes do not really ‘feel’ it. Yet, I acrimoniously externalize and record thoughts like “Oh, I seem to be distracted today, I wonder what keeps me busy”, or “Boy, I really don’t think this is my best piece of writing. Maybe, I should switch tasks and return to this writing when I am more present.” With this technique of bodily awareness, and attunement to the physical and mental space of writing, I find myself able to either re-center or, quite honestly, just stop writing when I notice writing becomes a chore rather than a meaningful expression.

The sound of a milk frother or high-pitched police sirens in the background create different habitats of writing – is it preposterous or liberating to write in public? Do you feel empowered by the hipster crowd in a fancy café, or do you get distracted by Instagrammable surroundings? Are you in a rush, or slightly ashamed of what you are writing? Are you hungover, on your period, about to see an old love affair and nervous whilst writing? Do you write more hastily, lazily or succinctly in transition?

Another practice of writing differently, intensified throughout the pandemic, is to move away from the screen, or stay away from the screen entirely. Isn’t it the paling human-screen-connection an artificial one to begin with? Instead, I stick to mobile modes of thinking that can ultimately materialize into writing – my most inspiring ideas have arguably emerged in the shower or doing the dishes. I would rather scribble down thoughts on the go than sit in front of a computer screen waiting for ideas to come. If we encounter writing not as the merely mechanical typing on a keyboard, seemingly mundane activities such as bench-sitting, breast-feeding, jogging, missing busses, standing in queues or being out of phone battery present themselves as crucial opportunities, moments and places to gather data about the places we research and study. These places matter in starting to think about writing, or to start writing altogether. It is in these micro-interactions that are conventionally not considered ‘work’ or ‘productive time’ where insights about ther connections between places, meanings, memories and cultural codes can shape a form of writing that goes under the skin, that interconnects with everyday experiences, struggles and hopes. Ultimately, by embracing the various contingent stages that precede textual existence, we can start to acknowledge that text exists both within but also well beyond its written form; necessarily other than its written appearance.

Outlook: Letting go in and of writing

Interconnections between here and there, then and now, myself and my data, the contingent beginnings and ends of written texts proliferate like mushrooms. Text itself is a “transitional space” that could “provide a place where differently experienced and imagined worlds come together”⁵. In this space where differences meet, a practice and poetic of letting go might unfold. Letting go entails to physically withdraw (part time?!) from conventional work environments, and mentally maybe even more so. It might jolt us towards the realization that much of the thinking that trickles into academic writing takes place in highly ordinary places, for example, while productively procrastinating (e.g., doing laundry, walking to the trash can or wandering eagerly towards the next ice cream parlor). It might be time to critically revisit the keyboard and screen as sites of inhibiting (or at least mediating) our writing experience. It might be time to reconceptualize notions of spending and wasting time altogether. Letting go can mean inviting the presence of the past into the present. Letting go can mean to drop the ball, or to get up and get going.

Why does d e c o n s t r u c t i o n unfold so sLOwLy? 
refusal through poetry
refuge in poetry
revolution? poetry
let_in_let_out_let_go

breathing text, or how to feel what you write                       
breathing in and through text
breathing out of text
sniff it
crumple it
this is not a text 	
this is not a text
rebellious research, our volume beyond academia
manage your noise, or it gets louder
wring yourself out of the game 
grind your teeth for academia 
growing academic teeth 
where is the place of tears in academia? 
aren’t our bodies already on the line? 
of course, the lines are not the same

In conclusion, (academic) writing is crucially about building connections between people, places, things and times. These connections are necessarily emplaced, or displaced, and with that, utterly spatial and embodied. Beyond the past years of more or less pandemic life, my desire to ‘go (back) out there’ has persistently built up: I want to sit in dive bars, on cold stones by the beach, I want to stumble back to hotels I have not slept in before, I want to get lost in ruins, traffic, crowds. Words are, become and make space; the places we inhabit enable the words we write. Some sentences take months in the making, others stream out effortlessly. Within these different rhythms of writing, let us respect slowness, quiet, passivity. Let this sourdough of thought sit – maybe, meaning will eventually waft from and beyond the exact number of words we’re always asked to not exceed – what if an academic text was significantly shorter?

In conclusion, (academic) writing is crucially about building connections between people, places, things and times. These connections are necessarily emplaced, or displaced, and with that, utterly spatial and embodied.

Sarah Gilmore, Nancy Harding, Jenny Helin and Alison Pullen suggest a “slow ontology”⁶ for and beyond academic writing, which “encourages researchers to ‘create writing that is not unproductive, but is differently productive”.⁷ This chimes with the intention of this journal as I interpret it – to celebrate modalities of productivity and production in tandem with forms of slowness, rejection, withdrawal, strike – let’s host a dance party instead. In slowness, we might inhabit places, knowledges, feelings, academia differently; we might carve out possibilities for institutional change that attend to values of care, solidarity, and sustainability in its multiple meanings.

I might not take your word for it
you may not take me up on mine
give these words back
who (p)re-writes what is being written 
the nimble relation between volume and sound, and word and number, and noise and sound
the politics of sub-titles

Ultimately, this text has suggested a more poetic, embodied engagement with the places we write in and about alongside an affective and spatially-attuned engagement with data. Again, it matters where we write about the places we write about. This text has also been a plea for rebooting our partially challenging encounters with places that are involuntarily close or distant. Lastly, I have made the humble suggestion to give more room in academic writing to the tired, out-of-breath, snotty, shivering states of being a researcher whilst writing in and about space.⁸ At last, this text is a celebration of valuing difference, contingency and vulnerability, which stretch well beyond writing, to nourish the hope we can, each in our own ways, write academia as a (w)hole otherwise. 

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^{1 Nadia Von Benzon et al., Creative Methods for Human Geographers (SAGE, 2021).}

^{2 Friederike Landau-Donnelly, “Poetic Academic,” in Doing Academic Careers Differently: Portraits of Academic Life, ed. Sarah Robinson, Alexandra Bristow, and Olivier Ratle (Routledge, 2023).}

^{3 Kirin Narayan, Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (University of Chicago Press, 2012).}

^{4 Beauchamps, “Doing Academia Differently: Loosening the Boundaries of Our Disciplining Writing Practices,” 394.}

^{5 Rendell, “Fragment of the Imagination: Assembling New Narratives from Old – Architectural Review.”}

^{6 Sarah Gilmore et al., “Writing Differently,” Management Learning 50, no. 1 (2019): 3–10, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507618811027, 9.}

^{7 See also: Monika Kostera, How to Write Differently: A Quest for Meaningful Academic Writing (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022); Lykke, Nina. Writing Academic Texts Differently: Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing (Routledge, 2015).}

^{8 Alison Pullen and Carl Rhodes, “Dirty Writing,” Culture and Organization 14, no. 3 (2008): 241–59, https://doi.org/10.1080/14759550802270684.}

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Dr. Friederike Landau is a political theorist, urban sociologist and cultural geographer. She is the author of the book Agonistic Articulations in the Creative City: On New Actors and Activism in Berlin’s Cultural Politics (Routledge) in which she explored the political organization of Berlin’s independent art scene(s). Friederike is interested in spatial and political theories of conflict, art-led activisms, politics of public art (esp. murals, monuments & museums) and the many forms, shapes and mo(ve)ments of ‘the political’. More information on www.friederikelandau.com.