Knowledge-Making from a Postgraduate Writers' Circle

In this beautifully crafted text Lucia Thesen offers deep insights into those unseen aspects of knowledge-making, the ‘back stuff’ of postgraduate writing. She immerses the reader in the ‘extra-textual’ life surrounding writing, through a visceral journey into the ‘swampy space’ of a postgraduate writers' circle. With its deep ethnography and interwoven theoretical resources, this book provides a fresh way of reimagining research writing.

* Cecilia Jacobs, Stellenbosch University, South Africa *

Knowledge that makes it to the formal archive (as publication or accepted thesis) is a sanitized myth. The archive’s occlusion of the twists and turns of knowledge-making as well as its premises have deleterious effects, as Lucia Thesen demonstrates. This book interprets two decades of her experience facilitating a writers' circle for postgraduate students. Serious research that is a sheer delight to read.

* Bassey E. Antia, University of the Western Cape, South Africa *
This book celebrates epistemic messiness, the serendipity of ideas and insights, and the leftover traces of pedagogic practice. It lends credibility to emotional experience of both writing student and writing teacher, which is mirrored stylistically in the intermingling flow of thoughts and feelings, often lyrical in texture. The book is rich in theoretical perspective, with insights from influential authors from both the global North and South. A stimulating read for practitioners and researchers in academic literacies. * Joan Turner, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK *

This book offers conceptual insights about understanding the interplay between academic literacy growth and its ecological complexity within tension-filled social dynamics. It also shows how to integrate the narrative presentation of such complexity in academic writing as a form of knowledge-making dialogue. These accounts can serve as a resource for researchers of doctoral literacy education and academic discourse socialisation. They may also inform EAP writing instructors about hands-on activities which can be adopted to cultivate students’ self-awareness in research conceptualisation and written communication.

* Keru Li, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China, Educational Review, 2024 *

...the novelty of this book lies in Thesen’s unorthodox and refreshing portrayal of such writing interventions as knowledge-making practices. Throughout the book, Thesen skillfully weaves together narratives from her eight years of facilitating a weekly “Thursday writer’s circle” at UCT [...] Notably, students and even former students
across disciplinary backgrounds and degrees of expertise (sometimes across institutions) participate in these activities (p. 24). Although much of the story is told from her perspective, Thesen also allows these students and other facilitators from the writing circle to speak for themselves—in fact, the book begins and ends with contributions from a former and current facilitator of the writing group. This combination of diverse perspectives throughout the book allows Thesen to examine how the group functions and intersects with the multiple needs and aspirations of its participants.

* Jonathan Faerber, Royal Roads University, Canada, Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie Volume 35, 2025 *

This is a remarkable, but also a gentle text, whose proposition appeals rather than forces, but it also contains some razor-sharp critique of the power of normativity to shape academics’ own writing as well as their work with student writers [...] In keeping with its ethnographic nature, this is a deeply situated and unique enquiry whose generalisability lies in its methodological reflexivity: it is an exemplar of how to carry out a rigorous and theoretically rich enquiry into one’s own practice [...] The book speaks to teachers of academic writing, offering insights into how to reframe or subtly work within, against and around dominant positions, helping postgraduate writers to see and even embrace different ways of doing research writing. The book will also appeal to academics, doctoral writers and publishing gatekeepers who are interested in the possibilities offered by writing—or reading—differently. The depth of description, coherence-in-complexity and the refusal to insist that what is offered is unitary or complete, combine to offer a compelling example of how different ways of knowing can be brought to bear persuasively in an academic text.

* Jackie Tuck, The Open University, UK and Lynn Coleman, Stellenbosch University, South Africa, Applied Linguistics, February 20