PhD Courses in Denmark

Apart from reading, writing is the most fundamental form of practice in academia. Similar to other practices, academic writing is saturated with norms, and as most norms, the norms for academic writing and academic language can be experienced as narrow and restrictive, as if academic language were monolithic. There may be many reasons to work with these norms. It might be methodologically necessary, for example if you are working at the borders of what can be documented in the archive but which nevertheless must be assumed; if the form your colleagues recognise as scholarly happens to be the form in which you cannot say what you mean; if writing as one is supposed to write begins to feel like a quiet form of self-misrepresentation. Maybe you think that just because we can distinguish form and content by abstraction, it does not mean that the two dimensions of a text are separate when the text is produced. Or, it may be that you need to take the monolith apart for your own sake — simply in order to be able to live in academia.

On the first two course days we will – through reading and presentations – investigate and reflect on and with the rich tradition of not writing monolithically that actually exists. On the course’s final and displaced day, we will, in groups, read each other’s papers and discuss them in a facilitated conversation.

Course program:

Wednesday 3th June

9-9.30: Coffee and check in

9:30-10.30: Hans Ulrik Rosengaard:

If Writing Otherwise Is an Answer to Something in the Sciences, What Is the Question? This talk aims to map three entangled dissatisfactions – epistemological, political, and existential – that have driven researchers across the humanities and social sciences toward experimental forms of writing. They share a common suspicion: that academic prose is not a neutral vehicle but a set of constraints on what can be known, who can be reached, and what kind of person survives the writing. Nietzsche gestured toward the deepest version of this suspicion when he observed that we will not be rid of God as long as we still believe in grammar. Audre Lorde pressed it toward the political when she stated that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. Whether these two formulations point in the same direction – or pull against each other in ways that cannot be reconciled – is something the talk does not presume to settle. It might suggest that living inside that tension may be what experimental academic writing actually is. The talk and the talker are still arguing over that point.

Readings: Richardson, Laurel (2000): “Writing - A Method of Inquiry”. Handbook of Qualitative Research. P.: 923-948. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publishing.

10:45-12: Rikke Andreassen: Absence and presence in research and writing: The researcher’s voice(s).

How does our research affect us and how do we respond to those affects? Often, we do not include our engagement (enjoyment or frustration) with empirical material, methodology or theory in our research writings and dissemination. But that happens when we do – to the material we research and to ourselves? And how is our writing a central part of our research engagement.

Readings:

Hartman, Saidiya (2019): “A note on method” (3 pages) and “An intimate history of slavery and freedom” (31 pages) in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. W. W. Norton & Company. ProQuest Ebook Central. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ep.fjernadgang.kb.dk/lib/kbdk/reader.action?docID=7170843&ppg=7

Andreassen, Rikke. 2025. “The story of Miss C.’s seduction of young women. A methodological quest into female same-sex relations at the turn of the twentieth century.” Gender & History 37: 267–281 (13 pages). https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12730

Andreassen, Rikke (2024). “Sex and Women in the Archive and New Imaginaries of Female Same-Sex Relations in the Late Nineteenth Century”. Lambda Nordica (2024). (20 pages)

12.30-13.30: Lunch

13.30-16: Maya Acharya: A Problem of Form: Desire and Disobedience in Academia

Why and how might we understand form as an ethical and political problem (Belcourt, 2020) in academic writing? During this session we will explore writing as deeply connected to power, violence and liveability: to what kinds of knowledge, and whose lives and affects, these forms sustain, and which they foreclose. Sharing tensions from my own research around desire, legibility, and epistemic opacity, I make the case that the narrative forms we engage are not distinct from academic work itself. Writing is not simply a medium, but a stance. Together, we’ll consider what it could mean to write in fugitive way, within and against the colonial conventions of the institution. Through examples of hybrid texts and a series of short creative writing exercises, we will experiment with fragmentation, redaction, and the tangential as deliberate methodological choices. I want to invite us to collectively consider how ‘unruly’ forms - poetic, collaborative, intuitive, disobedient ones - dig at/into dominant knowledge systems. How might writing create slippery interventions into epistemic hierarchies, opening up other possibilities for thinking, feeling, and knowing in and beyond the academy?

Readings:

Article: Harney, Stefano and Moten, Fred. 2020. the university: last words. (13 pages)

Poem: Mortimer, D. 2026. Thank you for your interest in the insitution. (3 pages) This is only published in print currently, but I can send/upload a digital copy before the session.

Sharpe, Christina. 2023. Ordinary Notes. London: Daunt Books Publishing, pp. 234 -268. (34 pages)

Thursday 4th June

9-9.30: Coffee

9.30-10: Hans Ulrik and Rikke: Yesterday and today

10-12:30 Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen: Proud Academic Craftsmen: On the Importance of Style, Voice and Authorship in the Age of GenAI

Today, we, as writing academics, find ourselves in a most peculiar situation. Never before in human history has so much academic prose been produced by the hour, yet we witness all around us a startling lack of ability of people individually and society generally to take in all the knowledge and novel insights put forward. As Isaac Asimov already put it back in 1988: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” A tragic tendency that has only been aggravated to the extreme by the emergence of generative AI technologies. So much academic “AI slop” is being thrown around these days that neither journal editors or funding programme managers can keep up with the pace of academic text production. What does this moment in historical time demand of us as craftspeople of academic texts – perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences?

Perhaps now, more than ever before, it is important to cultivate in ourselves a craftsman’s pride concerning our writing practices. Perhaps now is the time to foster a proper sense of creative competence that flows from personal and professional style, voice and authorship. Perhaps the time is ripe to develop our academic identities as writers instead of degenerating into sad existences of prompters serving big tech with our interactive inputs training their profit generating and power accumulating LLMs. In this workshop, Martin will present crucial perspectives on the craft of creative academic writing and offer some valuable exercises that we are going to do and discuss together.

Readings:

Bechky, B. A. & Davis, G. F. (2025). Resisting the Algorithmic Management of Science: Craft and Community After Generative AI. In: Administrative Science Quaterly, (70:1), p. 1-22 Hart, (2011). “Chapter 4: Voice and Style”. In: Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction. The University of Chicago Press, p. 62-74 Franklin, J. (1985). Preface, “Chapter I: The New School for Writers” & “Chapter VI: The Outline”. In: Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner. Plume, p. xv-xix, 21-27 & 109-132

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-16:00 Christiane Mossin: Essayistic Performativity: Freedom, Pleasure, Impotence and Critique

The presentation will highlight the performative implications of essayistic style, based on a comparison of Adorno’s and Woolf’s respective understandings and, not least, enactments of essayistic writing. Both writers find play and freedom to be as significant as discipline and form. Yet, they imply that essayistic freedom is constrained by certain unutterabilities — revolving on cultural power and ideology, fragmented self, and corporeality. Such unutterabilities are to some extent thematized in their essays, but they may also emerge through a performative analysis hinging on questions such as: How does the essay enact cultural power (rather than merely discussing it)? How is the writing self—with its fragmentation and ineffable corporeality—brought to the stage of the essay? How is critique and pleasure enacted and negotiated?

Readings:

Adorno, Theodor W. (1998). ”Essayet som form”, i: Passage, nr. 28-29 - https://tidsskrift.dk/passage/article/view/4045/154951

Adorno, Theodor W. (2019). “The Essay as Form” In Notes to Literature, edited by ROLF TIEDEMANN, 29–47. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.7312/ador17964-004. https://soeg.kb.dk/permalink/45KBDK_KGL/16rci4r/cdi_walterdegruyter_books_10_7312_ador17964_004

Woolf, Virginia (1966). “Craftsmanship”, “Professions for Women” og "Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-car”, i: Collected Essays Vol. II. London: The Hogarth Press. Links på Teams.