Special Issue CfP: Deadline 30 September 2023
This special issue brings collective writing to the fore. Writing together can be an intimate experience, both embodied and emergent. We offer this space to engage in rhizomatic reflections about the co-writing experience and to reflect on the nature of co-producing knowledge as a sociology of knowledge practice. We also invite the application of genre-bending and blurring modalities, emotional writing, first voice writing and writing in which the authors explore their own agency in the process of writing.
Writing differently (Gilmore et al., 2019) is a developing tradition within management and organizational studies among feminist writers. However, fictocritical approaches (Gibbs, 2005; Williams, 2021), collective biography (Gannon, S. Davies, 2006; Gonick et al., 2011), poetics (Cunliffe, 2002), autoethnography and co-autoethnography (Coia & Taylor, 2013; Ellis et al., 2011; Moss, 2014) though well established in social studies and humanities, remain on the fringe of feminist inquiry in management and organizational studies.
This special issue aims to create an opportunity for these modalities to be central to the research endeavour and to promote collective explorations of these intimate writing practices. These encounters are intimate, in that they reveal more of the writer(s), and they dismiss the perceived merit of objectivity promoted within positivist approaches (instead appreciating context and subjectivity). Additionally, creative modalities tend to blur many, if not all, of the perceived boundaries of traditional academic approaches (especially within management and organizational studies) and promote within the process of writing…possibility.
This special issue invites papers which challenge the confines of classification (Rhodes, 2015), blend genres (Jiwa, 2013), offer satirical critiques (Krysa et al., 2019), incorporate ethnographic fiction (Jacobson & Larsen, 2014) and literary approaches, such as poetry (Fisiak, 2011; Phillips, 2013). We invite authors to collaborate in new and novel ways and to use modes of writing (1) to reveal themselves within the process of writing, (2) to reveal new insights and (3) to resist convention (Ahonen et al., 2014). These approaches can create vivid portraits (contemporary or historical) through situated knowledge and reflexivity. We encourage writers to reconstruct the author(s) role within feminist epistemologies, exploring agency, voice and empowerment (Fisiak, 2011).
We are inviting papers which consider (in the context of management and organizational studies):
- The intimacy of co-producing knowledge and novel sociology of knowledge practices
- The contemplation of literary strategies which challenge academic modes of writing
- The application of genre blending and blurring modalities
- Emotional writings and first voice writings, which contribute to our expanding view of the value of reflexivity
- Rhizomatic reflections and recollections at the intersection of the personal and the organizational self
- Ironic, satirical, and passionate engagements with, or critiques of, the semiotics of text
- Embodied and emergent writing in which the writers are implicated in new ways in the research process
- Storytelling methods and narrative writing approaches in which the authors are seen as constitutive subjects in a broader dialogic encounter
- Explorations in co-writing as a form of resistance and emancipation
Contributions not addressing these specific themes but relevant to the scope of this call are also welcome.
We anticipate a publication date for the SI in early to mid 2025.