Announcing the Fall 2014 Writers’ Workshop series!

This entry is part 1 of 12 in the Fall 2014 Writer’s Workshop series.

Anthropologists are writers. We research, we teach, we write. However, our training is as anthropologists, not as writers. How then does the anthropologist become a writer? How do we move from functional, mechanical prose that communicates ideas and findings to writing as a craft? How do we write anthropology in a way that does justice to the stories we tell?

Writing well matters. We now have multiple volumes addressing writing in anthropology, on histories of ethnographic writing, on anthropologists coming into their own writing voices, and “how-to” writing guides—see my earlier post Anthropologists: Ready, Set, Write! for a discussion of these. But, we still need more conversation about writing and more spaces for collectively thinking through how and what we write, and why.

Our Writers’ Workshop series is designed to be just such a space. Launched last January in conjunction with the Savage Minds Writing Group, our initial Writers’ Workshop showcased essays by ten anthropologists—Robin Bernstein, Sienna Craig, Zoë Crossland, Kristin Ghodsee, Kirin Narayan, Michael Ralph, Matt Sponheimer, Gina Athena Ulysse, Bianca Williams, and myself—on aspects of the writing process. I am delighted to announce that we have an excellent group of contributors for this fall’s Writers’ Workshop series. Each Monday, I will post an essay from one of our guest authors. While we will not have a separate writing group accompanying the workshop, I invite all anthropologists to read the series and to join in the conversation as it unfolds this fall. A thank you in advance to this fall’s guest authors:

September 8—Paul Stoller, “Finding Your Way”

September 15—Noel B. Salazar, “The Writing Behind the Written”

September 22—Marnie Thomson, “In Dialogue: Ethnographic Writing and Listening”

September 29—Whitney Battle-Baptiste, “Writing to Live: On Finding Strength While Watching Ferguson”

October 6—Mary Murrell, “Writing to be Read”

October 13—Roxanne Varzi, “Ethnographic Fiction: The Space Between”

October 20—Adia Benton, “Mourning, survival and time: Writing through crisis”

October 27—Ghassan Hage, “Writing Anti-Racism”

November 3—Sita Venkateswar, “Writing to become…”

November 10—Catherine Besteman, “On Ethnographic Unknowability”

November 17—Kevin Carrico, “Thinking through the untranslatable”

Here’s to another inspiring series. Let’s get writing!

Series NavigationFinding Your Way >>
Carole McGranahan

I am an anthropologist and historian of Tibet, and a professor at the University of Colorado. I conduct research, write, lecture, and teach. At any given time, I am probably working on one of the following projects: Tibet, British empire, and the Pangdatsang family; the CIA as an ethnographic subject; contemporary US empire; the ongoing self-immolations in Tibet; the Chushi Gangdrug resistance army; refugee citizenship in the Tibetan diaspora (Canada, India, Nepal, USA); and, anthropology as theoretical storytelling.

2 thoughts on “Announcing the Fall 2014 Writers’ Workshop series!

  1. Thanks for all of your assistance for getting these classes geared for new upcoming writers.

Comments are closed.