Knowledge-making from a postgraduate writers’ circle: A Southern Reflectory

This volume in Multilingual Matters’ Studies in Knowledge Production and Participation series builds on, and re-imagines, a rich tradition of work in writing studies and Academic Literacies which has emerged in the past three decades, in which scholars located outside the academy’s global ‘centre’ have played a leading role. The book is both a rich personal reflection on the author’s own practice as a writing circle facilitator, and a scholarly, deeply theorized post-qualitative enquiry into the nature of postgraduate writing as a knowledge-making practice. Written in lyrical style, it makes fewer concessions to the dry cadences of conventional academic prose than is usual in texts which constitute the body of scholarly published work which Thesen calls the ‘formal archive’, one of the guiding concepts of this book. Beneath the book’s playfulness and fluidity, however, lie a rigorous methodological and theoretical framing and a compelling auto/ethnographic data set (incorporating notes, sketches, gathered texts, interview-conversations and focus groups), persuading the reader that this is a serious, not merely impressionistic or quixotic, work. The reader is carried along via shifts and surprises as Thesen creates her ‘epistemic assemblage’ (p. 7), while always also making clear what she aims to do and why.