2024-2025 ACADEMIC WRITING classes

Confluence 4: March 21, 22 2025

From Garden to Planet – Critical Creative Writing Workshop

Led by Antonia Majaca

"I found the door that opened into the flower and vegetable garden: I realized the importance of the question of the land." - Mariarosa Dalla Costa

How might feminist materialist approaches to "the planetary" challenge the increasing co-optation of planetary discourse by techno-solutionist and right-wing frameworks? This hands-on writing workshop uses Mariarosa Dalla Costa's garden-based epistemology as a starting point to develop critical responses to contemporary planetary discourse.

Through guided close reading and focused writing exercises, participants will engage with feminist materialist approaches that ground planetary thinking in reproductive labor and earth-based knowledge. The workshop creates space to contrast these embodied epistemologies with techno-solutionist discourses that naturalize existing power relations through biological metaphors. We will examine how concepts like "planetary immunity," "planetary consciousness," and "earth systems" are being deployed by elite institutions, while developing critical writing that connects the garden to the planet without abstracting from material relations.

The workshop will move between two textual landscapes: feminist materialist writings on reproductive labor and planetary relations, and contemporary institutional discourse on "planetary governance" and "planetary sapience." Participants will engage in both individual analytical writing and collaborative critical response.

Confluence 3: 11 & 12 January 2025, Nida

Writing with Others, Writing From the Guts workshop

tutored by Bethany Crawford

This workshop explores methodologies for writing collaboratively—writing with others, with non-human agents such as AI, images, and substances, and reflecting on the collaborative nature of reference and citation. Together, we’ll investigate different modes of writing, unpack the reasons why we write, and consider what we aim to achieve through our acts of creation.

We’ll unpack how knowledge, writing, and storytelling are performative acts rather than fixed objects. How does writing do, rather than simply be? How can we reveal the structures, relations, and agencies—both human and non-human—that shape and influence our writing practices? How do we metabolise sensory information from the world around us, our engagements and relations, into the words that we compose and outputs we articulate? 

Using examples like McKenzie Wark’s Raving and Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s Thought in the Act, we’ll examine the tension and beauty of co-creation: the "uneasy but beautifully intense" process of writing in and through difference. Through discussions and hands-on exercises, we’ll explore how referencing, borrowing, and citation are inherently collaborative, placing us in an ongoing dialogue across time, space, and mediums.

From experimenting with AI as a co-author to collaborating with the vibrancy of images or environments, ingesting substances to alter perception, or simply writing with friends and colleagues, this workshop invites you to think critically and creatively about writing as a collective act. By embracing the messiness and intensity of collaboration, we’ll uncover new ways of creating, connecting, and expanding the possibilities of the written word.

Confluence 2: 7 & 8 December 2024, Nida

Introduction

tutored by Dina A. Mohamed

Confluence 5: tutored by Dina A. Mohamed