Ninna Meier

Borrowing brainpower – sharing insecurities. Lessons learned from a doctoral peer writing group

Academic writing is a vital, yet complex skill that must be developed within a doctoral training process. In addition, becoming an academic researcher is a journey of changing sense of self and identity. Through analysis of a group session, we show how the feedback of peers addresses questions of structure and writing style along with wider issues of researcher identity. Thus, peer learning is demonstrated as a process of simultaneously building a text and an identity as scholarly researcher. The paper advocates ‘borrowing brainpower’ from peers in order to write better texts and, at the same time, ‘share insecurities’ during the development of the researcher identity. Based on a distributed notion of peer learning and identity, we point to the need for further research into the everyday activities of doctoral writing groups in order to understand the dynamic relationship between production of text and creation of researcher identity.

Writing with Resonance

In this article, we explore what organization and management scholars can do to write with resonance and to facilitate an emotional, bodily, or in other ways sensory connection between the text and the reader. We propose that resonance can be relevant for organization and management scholars in two ways. First, it may facilitate a better understanding of the research we are attempting to convey in our papers, an understanding that draws on the reader’s prior experiences, and their embodied, embedded knowledge. Second, resonance may foster an inclination in the reader to engage with, contribute to, and thus bring forward the field of research in question. We propose that writing with resonance may be a way to further the impact of academic work by extending the modalities with which our readers can relate to and experience our work.

Knowing Across Time and Place

This chapter contains two stories based on the same academic work viewed from two different vantage points. One story is the traditional story of how I went from A (field studies) to B (results), following the traditional route step by step. This, however, is not the whole story. By sharing the second story, the story of how I actually got to B by virtue of a detour (iterations of thinking, writing, doing prompted by a tendency to draw things), I offer an example of how I fully understood and appreciated both what I did and the analytical insights I gained only after having detoured physically and mentally from what I had planned. In short, I show how a conference presentation at the other side of the world in my case allowed me to retrospectively make sense of what I had been doing by telling others what I did.

Editors’ Introduction: The Power of ‘Showing How It Happened’

This book is a collection of personal essays about the unplanned, accidental and even obstructive events that occur in research life and the substantial potential for analytical insights herein. We call them detours—the routes we did not plan, the clutter we made or encountered when carrying out our research and the results of it all—which we may not fully understand. Sharing such stories has the power to make us more adventurous, sensitive and creative researchers. Hopefully, some of these stories will resonate with you as a reader and make you feel like writing. By writing–sharing–reading–writing, we can expand the playground of research and inspire a research culture in which ‘accountable’ research methodologies involve adventurousness and not-being-so-sure.

Sleep, Pretty Darling, Do not Cry

You wrote about your mother’s funeral and that you have always had a knack for organising events. I know it is from a sorrowful part of your writing and I should probably give you comfort by writing back to you about sorrow. Your account touched me and still does now when I reread it. I am so sorry for your loss and I did not reply. I do not really know what to say or do. I want to take you in my arms and sing you a lullaby. Someone who has a knack for organising is not easy to cradle in your arms.

To Stay with it and Don’t Run Away

While intensely writing and extending this file, we also talk on the phone and send each other text messages. This morning, you texted me that is was about time you read Bollas. I don’t know his work, so I browsed through a few reviews of The Mystery of Things (1999). Then I started writing and soon, a new version of your text from yesterday emerged in my mailbox. For the first time, we were writing simultaneously. I quit writing to read your text first. For the first time, I was scared.

That’s Okay, That’s Life!

Today on the phone, you told me that you were going to spend some of your “ten per cent disabled” compensation on a beautiful ring for your “shitty hand” and then you would marry it and rename it. Most of the compensation, you will spend in Oxford with your family on Easter break. I know you love this place and the knowledge, wisdom, and beauty it holds. This is just the right way to spend your compensation. Comforting and sad at the same time, just as you wrote yesterday.

Torn Apart and Put Together, Slowly, Clumsily, Over Time

On the first pages of A. S. Byatt’s short novel The Biographer’s Tale (2001), the protagonist Phineas Nanson abandons his poststructuralist literary studies and walks out of the lecture hall into “real life” to become a biographer. In his quest for “things” and “facts”, however, he runs into considerable trouble. There are indeed things in the world but some are “thingier” than others. Some things are so airy that they continuously escape him, and things have unfortunately inscribed meanings far beyond their factual appearance.

I’ve Told the Truth, I Didn’t Come to Fool You

I wake up at 5.33 am with thoughts of being a kid in my head. I keep longing for this kind of being: undisturbed, non-responsible, pure curiosity. I don’t remember talking to the grownups much or interacting with siblings or friends. I remember being in the world, examining the physical world around me: the house, the garden.

Comforting and Very Sad at the Same Time

I keep thinking about how academic work is both contextual and tied to a person/a body in time and place and utterly free to travel and connect with people and thoughts across time and space, in several places at once. This is an important part of the materiality of research, I think: that thoughts need what we could call an action point or touch point, a body and a consciousness, to connect. And that the connection is always conditioned by what this person brings to it. I feel this split more acutely when I dive into intense data analysis, and I am on the verge of one such period now.