Embodied Values in Academic Writing
A three-part workshop:
Tuesday 25 March, Tuesday 1 April & Tuesday 8 April
What is it to do good work? This question is constantly humming in the background of your life as a researcher and writer. And sometimes it comes to the foreground, such as when you receive a disappointing critique, experience tension with a coauthor, or feel stuck in an internal conflict or creative block.
While these challenges are commonly cast as issues of standards or productivity, they are also, more fundamentally, a matter of values. Values are the principles and priorities that shape — consciously or unconsciously — how you engage with your work and with others, and how that engagement feels.
Maybe you resonate strongly with values related to play and discovery! Or maybe you know yourself as someone who prizes precision and carefulness in relation to your academic work. There are values around delivering results, being responsive to others, fostering inclusivity, letting yourself be heard as a voice of influence… and more.
Values can be a source of clarity, but they can also bring overwhelm. This is especially the case when it feels that we must care about everything all at once.
- How can we shift from trying to honour too many values to relating to our work with clarity and confidence?
- How can we allow ourselves to work from natural motivation, without constantly judging ourselves as falling short?
- How can we cultivate understanding for others driven by different values, so we can work together more effectively, make compromises that don’t kill motivation, or at least coexist peacefully?
These are the questions we’ll explore in this experiential workshop.
Who is this workshop for?
It’s for researcher-writers who want to care for their ongoing capacity to write, contribute, and collaborate from a place of integrity and kindness.
Maybe you:
- feel overwhelmed by the demands of writing and publishing, and are longing for more inner calm, centredness, and self-trust;
- are less clear than you used to be about the principles and priorities you work from, and wish to come back to greater clarity;
- find yourself in tension or conflict with a coauthor, collaborator, superior, editor, reviewer – or even more broadly with your academic environment — and want new tools for tending to your writing and your relationships with care;
- are simply curious about what you’ll learn and discover about the kind of writer, researcher and person you are in a guided inquiry that connects values to writing.
Contents of the workshop
This workshop consists of three 2-hour sessions via Zoom, spaced two weeks apart.
- In session 1, we’ll open with what values mean to you, and when and how you encounter them in your writing-work. You'll then get to explore the values-map we will use in all three sessions, understand its spatial logic, and use it to begin embodying values. What insights are you getting from comparing and contrasting different values in this way? What situations in your writing and research do these insights begin to illuminate?
- In session 2, we’ll turn to working with contrasting and conflicting values. This session will focus on the polarity between being conservative versus innovative in writing. How and where does this tension show up for you, and how can exploring this systematically through the values-map give you a new perspective on it? What are some ways for working with this tension, whether it manifests as an inner conflict or a source of friction in your work with other people?
- In session 3, we’ll continue to work with contrast, conflict, and possibilities for reconciliation between different values. This time, the focus will be on the polarity between self-oriented versus other-oriented values in writing and research. In the last part of this session, you get to consolidate your insights from all three sessions and identify concrete ways to further integrate them in your writing life.
You’ll also receive homework prompts for your own exploration in between sessions, and supporting materials to help you integrate and apply your learning.
An embodied approach
We could just talk about values — but working in an experiential way makes it much more likely you’ll gain insights that are real discoveries, have deep personal relevance, and provide helpful clarity for your future actions and decisions.
This workshop’s approach to experiential learning makes use of our human bodies’ capacity for movement in and through space. Based on a system called UZAZU Embodied Intelligence, you get to move in and out of values and explore them (a bit like you might try on different outfits).
Specifically, working with values in this way:
- Supports curiosity — Not having to verbally articulate your values in a way that is coherent or representative frees you up to find new layers and nuances to what you already know about what motivates you.
- Allows you to approach values-based tensions and conflicts with more understanding and empathy — Exploring values as physical locations in space allows you to experience them as distinct yet interconnected. This spatial insight into value dynamics removes much of the blame, shame, and frustration that often accompany tensions and conflicts.
- Promotes internal organization and clarity — By tapping on not just your mental but also your physical capacity to compare and contrast different values, you create a more structured relationship with them. This internal organization calms your nervous system and enhances your ability to identify relevant values in different situations, make wise decisions, navigate interpersonal dynamics, and shift from stagnation back into action.
How this workshop came to be
This workshop is rooted in UZAZU Embodied Intelligence, a methodology that gave me its foundational values-map. I’ve adapted this map, and the discovery process it supports, for the landscape of academic writing and research.
In the process, I got some helpful insights into writing-related situations in my own life. Why it’d been right to say No to a collaboration that had sounded like an ideal fit for me. How, when we disagreed, my co-author and I were each upholding very different but equally valid values of good work. Why I sometimes doubt myself when my values lead me to pause or drop writing projects while I see others bring theirs to fruition.
These insights helped me clear vestiges of shame, judgment, and second-guessing related to those situations. They also brought me back to something I already knew from personal experience and working with my coaching clients: gaining clarity about our values can help us recover confidence and appreciation for ourselves as writers. From this calm place, we can enter more skillfully into collaboration and produce more authentic work.
My deepest intention for this offering is that it will support you towards such outcomes!
FAQs
If you have any other questions about this workshop, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Registration information
COST
The introductory fee for this new workshop is €180
Includes:
- three live Zoom sessions of 2 hours each (these consist of a mixture of conversation and guided embodied inquiry);
- recordings of the sessions you can watch via reply or download;
- homework prompts and other supporting materials to help you integrate and apply your learning.
Limited to 12 participants.
Registration closes on 24 March 2025.
Note: If you wish to pay for the workshop through your University, please select ‘offline payment’ at checkout and I will reach out regarding invoicing specifics.
DATES & TIMES
1st workshop: Tuesday 25 March, 3-5 pm CET (2 -4 pm BST / 10 am – noon EST / 10 pm – midnight SGT)
2nd workshop: Tuesday 1 April, 3-5PM CET (2 -4 pm BST / 10 am – noon EST / 9 – 11 pm SGT)
3rd workshop: Tuesday 8 April, 3-5PM CET (2 -4 pm BST / 9-11 am EST / 9 – 11 pm SGT)
Recordings will be made available within 48 hours, so if you have to miss a session you can easily catch up with the rest of the group.
Photographs on this page: reflective sphere by Yeshi Kangrang, birds in sky by Ju Guan, skylight by Wen Liu, portrait by Kylie Sabine.