Site-Writing

Situated Writing as Theory and Method (2019)
  • Dr Mona Livholts | London

  • Figure 1 Figure 2a Figure 2b Figure 3
  • Situated Writing as Theory and Method (2019)
  • Dr Mona Livholts | London
  • narrative writing as art-based practice


    Situated Writing as Theory and Method. The Untimely Academic Novella, (London: Routledge, 2019).

    This creative and original book develops a framework for situated writing as theory and method, and presents a trilogy of untimely academic novellas as exemplars of the uses of situated writing. 

    It is an inter- and trans-disciplinary book in which a diversity of forms is used to create a set of interwoven novellas, inspired by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory and literary fiction, along with narrative life writing genres such as diaries and letters, memory work, poetic writing, and photography. The book makes use of a politics of location, situated knowledges, diffraction, and intersectionality theories to promote situated writing as a theory and method for exploring the complexity of social life through gender, whiteness, class, and spatial location. 

    It addresses writing as an inter- and trans-disciplinary form of scholarship in its own right, with emancipatory potential, emphasising the role of writing in shaping creative, critical, and reflexive approaches to research, education, and professional practice. It is useful for researchers, teachers, postgraduate and PhD students in feminist and intersectionality studies, narrative studies, and pursuing interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities, social sciences, design, and the arts to inspire a theory and method for situated writing.


    Biography

    Mona Livholts, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Social Work in the Department of Culture and Society, Linköping University, Sweden. Her research focuses on emergent writing methodologies, in particular auto/biographical and narrative life writing genres such as diaries and letters, memory work, poetry, and photography. Research themes include media narratives on rape, gender, space and communication, and glocalised social work. She has invented new forms of critical, creative and reflexive writing, such as A ThinkingWriting Methodology, Post/Academic Writing, The Untimely Academic Novella and Situated Writing (with Tamboukou). During 2008-2017 she founded and led the Network for Reflexive Academic Writing Methodologies (RAW) and gives lectures, seminars and workshops on writing in Sweden and internationally. Books include Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies (2012), Discourse and Narrative Methods (with Tamboukou 2015), Social Work in a Glocalised World (with Bryant 2017) and Situated Writing as Theory and Method. The Untimely Academic Novella (2019).


    Practices

    I work with writing as a critical spatial practice by making use of narrative life writing genres, and recommend the article ‘Narrative writing as art-based practice’ published in Synnyt/Origins: Finnish Studies in Art Education (3/2018) as an example of such a practice. The main question is: What are the potential possibilities of narrative life writing genres to contribute to shape creative and performative art-based practice for scholars across the arts, design and science? In my practice I explore epistemological questions about the author as creator and storyteller is useful as a catalyst for such practices. Inspired by auto/biography- and life writing, feminist theory and literary fiction, I promote the idea of artistic self-portraiture where the writers at work perform their writing selves in specific situated locations, power relations and inter/disciplinary contexts. 

    https://wiki.aalto.fi/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=145123907&preview=/145123907/148281526/Livholts.pdf


    Keywords
    Situated Writing, Diffractive Writing, Untimely Academic Novella, Narrative Life Writing Genres, Textual/Visual Methodology, Art-Based Practice.

    References

    Berger, John (1984/2005) And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. London: Bloomsbury.

    Cixous, Hèléne (2004) ‘Enter the Theatre’. In: Prenowitz, E. (ed.), Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous. London & New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 25–34. 

    Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1892/1989). The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings. New York, NY: Bentam books.


    Other projects
  • Signal/Noise: Ambient Text in the Urban Landscape (ongoing project)
  • Site Stories: explorations of urban spaces through drawing and animation (25–29 April 2022)
  • Rainbow Palace, Bergen, Norway (March 2022)
  •  Acanthus, (March 2022)
  • Unter der Hohen Brücke. 
digging in a ditch, writing for a place 
(2021)
  • ‘Reading-writing alongside HALL08,’ HALL08 (2021)
  • Nothingness Beyond Blossom (2021)
  • Angelo Ciccaglione, ‘The back of the dust-machine, where the visitors pour the dust in,’ Rotterdam (2021)
    The Deposition of Dust (July 2021)
  • Skye Edge (April 2021)
  • Corvid-19 (15 March 2021)
  • 1_5
    Glòries_(Eixample). A dispositive for very slow aesthetic observation, (January 2021 –)
  • As Lightning to the Children Eased (January 2021)
  • Station F (October 2020)
  • It’s Just a Matter of Time (2020)
  • 1
    Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History,
    issue # 1: ‘beginnings,’ (2020)
  • Homekeeping-image_sml
    Homekeeping (2020)
  • City Embers (2020)
  • Between Our Words I will Trace Your Presence (February 2020)
  • What Remains (2019)
  • Situated Writing as Theory and Method (2019)
  • Parts Apart Read Together (2019)
  • Fields of Awareness, (2019, 3min 18 secs)
  • A Non-Aligned Narrative in and Around KSEVT, (2019)
  • 21 Orientations: An Atlas of Geographic Promiscuity (2019)
  • The Windowless Hotel Room (2018)
  • Spaces of Grief (2018)
  • Soft Landing (2018)
  • Shared Remains (April 2018)
  • Poetic Water Boundaries: towards a possible borderless sea, (2018)
  • Metropolitan Salem, Liuerpul (9 June – 18 August 2018)
  • Things Come Apart (21 – 24 March 2018)
  • Learn to Read Differently (2018)
  • Il Balcone. A site-writing performance (2018)
  • History begins with the vanity of kings (2018)
  • Dear Mr. Jung: Inhabiting Carl Jung’s ‘The Red Book’ (May 2018)
  • A Lunar Perspective, (2018-2020)
  • Heaton Hall: A Palimpsest (2017)
  • Location (+) (2017)
  • There’s Sand in My Infinity Pool (2017)
  • Talking Quilts (April 2017)
  • fifteen ways to cross the desert (2017)
  • Between Landscape and Confinement: Situating the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (2017)
  • Agency at the threshold, (2017)
  • A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground (2017)
  • The Glorious Tomb to the Memory of Nothing (2016)
  • The Arrival’s Reader; A Visual Literary Criticism on The Arrival by Shaun Tan (2016)
  • Reading as Art (27 August-19 November 2016)
  • Re: development (London: Silent Grid, 2016)
  • Kjemikerens død [The Death of the Chemist] (23 – 26 May 2016)
  • Kingsland High Street (2016)
  • Foray in a Modern Reserve: An Impounding Portrait of Landuse (2016 – 2018)
  • Fall of the Derwent (2016)
  • Away from Home – Home from Away (April 2016)
  • Penguin Pool (2015)
  • Geography Lessons: Liberian Landmarks 1953-2013 (2015)
  • Women’s Anarchist Nuisance Café (2014)
  • The Writing on the Wall (after Rembrandt) (2014)
  • The Italic I (2014)
  • Designing Architecture as a Performing-Ground (2014)
  • Urban Literacy (2013/2014/2016)
  • The Disappearance: Manfredo Tafuri’s The Sphere and the Labyrinth (April 2013)
  • Folded Ground: Escape from Cape Town (2013)
  • Phantom Railings (2012 – 2017)
  • In The Emptiness Between Them (2012)
  • 10/08/12 (multispecies event) (2012)
  • An Arcades Project (2011)
  • Tideline (2010-2012)
  • The Museum of Breath (2010)
  • Slab (2010)
  • One wound. Two wounds. The body as site for writing (2010)
  • The Fluid Pavement and Other Stories on Growing Old (2006)
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