Writing Across Boundaries

Each year the Writing Across Boundaries Project runs an intensive, two-day, residential workshop for social science PhD students in their third year to explore analytical and practical approaches to writing and offers participants an opportunity to reflect on the writing process itself as a form of social science thinking.
The next Writing Across Boundaries workshop will take place on the 4th and 5th of April 2019 at The Lindisfarne Centre, St Aidan’s College, Durham University.

▸ Read the blog of a participant of a previous workshop. ◂

Eligible Participants

The workshop is for PhD students in the social sciences in their third year of study, who:

• Are interested in the practice and product of ethnographic writing as a particular way of conveying a contextual understanding of lived reality by drawing on a range of specific methods including, for instance, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, archival research, visual analysis, life-histories and surveys.
• Are at the point of translating this data into written out-put for a thesis; and
• Have completed their fieldwork and have data that they have begun to process.

Programme

The provisional programme for the workshop will be available soon, but we are delighted to confirm the participation of Professor Bob Simpson (Durham) and Dr Sarah Winkler-Reid (Newcastle).

How to Apply

There are only 30 places available on our 2019 workshop. If you are interested in attending please complete the online application form(available from the course website by Monday, February 9th 2019 (5pm). Candidates will then be contacted by the Project Team by Friday,February 15th 2019 (5pm) as to whether they have been selected to join the workshop.

Please note that the online application form requires a letter of support from your principal supervisor to be attached. This letter is crucial in evaluating your application, as it is important that the needs of participants are closely matched as possible to the style and content of the workshop.

Applications received after the deadline will not be accepted.

Costs

The workshop registration is free for those from our regional and Northern Irish universities (Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Teesside, Sunderland, Queens and Ulster). For those from outside the Northern Ireland and North East Doctoral Training Partnership, we are charging £60. This includes lunch on both days and an evening hot buffet on the 4th of April.

There will be limited overnight accommodation available at one of the Durham University Colleges, on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of April if needed, for £52 per night. If you accept a place on the workshop, you will be provided with a link to book your own accommodation online. Unfortunately we are not able to assist with accommodation or travel costs for any of the participants.

Further Information

Please contact Cathrine Degnen on [email protected] , or Tom Yarrow on [email protected] , if you require any further information about the Writing Across Boundaries workshop.

Participant Feedback

‘The impact [of the workshop] has been phenomenal. I was losing sleep before but when I came back I got straight on to it and wrote reams and reams, so it was like opening a floodgate – it gave me the opportunity to move on as a writer.’ (Doctoral Candidate in Education, Workshop 2)

‘I was scared before I got there, I felt challenged about things I didn’t know about, that I wouldn’t know enough. But when I got there I wasn’t intimidated at all, everyone was very willing to share. It gave me permission to let my creative intuition take me forward.’ (Doctoral candidate in Gerontology, Workshop 3)