YOU BELONG HERE. 2 - A different horizon: developing a creative and critical voice for academic writing
Writing for academic publication carries a weight of institutional expectations around meeting academic standards, making an original contribution to scholarship, and time pressures—all of which seem to leave little room for the practice of creative writing and thinking. Years of intensive research can paradoxically lead to a sense of “losing one’s voice”, or a feeling that creativity is drying up in the process of knowledge production. This workshop offers some experimental techniques and advice for re-filling your inner well, and for blending creative and critical practice. It also explores the concept of voice as something that is already multi-vocal and situated against horizons of (im)possibility. In other words, which communities, relational others and radical futures are we writing for, and how might this help us overcome the fear and imposter syndrome that stand in the way of a more fulfilling, expressive as well as critical writing practice?
Facilitator: Dr Kavita Maya, Editor + Collective Member of Feminist Review
Free to attend, but registration is required.
Please email the team at [email protected] if you have questions about access.
YOU BELONG HERE. 30 Apr - 14 May
This session is part of the YOU BELONG HERE. online workshop series facilitated by the Feminist Review Collective and taking place at 12-1pm GMT on the following Thursdays:
30 April ‘Academic publishing as radical praxis’ with Dr Kyoung Kim
14 May 'Who gets to theorise?: decolonial pedagogies in academic writing’ with Dr Madhulika Sonkar
YOU BELONG HERE. is part of BREAKING THROUGH: Support for global majority researchers and creative practitioners navigating the journey to scholarly publication, a programme co-organised by the Feminist Review Collective and the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute (DeAI) hosting weekly online workshops from 30 April to 5 June 2026. All events are free to attend, but registration is required.
Click here for the full programme and links to register.
CONTRIBUTORS
Dr Kavita Maya is an interdisciplinary feminist writer, scholar and ethnographer with research expertise in the sociology and politics of gender, race, colonialism and sexuality in contemporary religion and counterculture. She is an editorial member of the Feminist Review Collective. She holds a PhD from SOAS University of London (2019), with a thesis entitled Feminist Arachnopolitics: An Antiracist Feminist Critique of the Goddess Movement in Britain. Her work has been published in Feminist Theology and Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy. Her teaching and writing practices emphasize creative social critique and poststructuralist thought.
The Feminist Review Collective edits and publishes Feminist Review, a pioneering interdisciplinary journal that explores gender in its multiple forms and interrelationships with other social categories and systems of power, publishing accessible knowledge and timely interventions that build on the work of Black, Indigenous, decolonial, and transnational feminist struggles. Publishing since 1979, Feminist Review has a global editorial board and readership, and currently prints and distributes in partnership with Sage Publications Ltd. The Feminist Review Collective is committed to inspiring exchanges of ideas and explorations of praxis that address, disrupt, and break through structural violence to make and nurture communities, connections, and ways of sharing knowledge founded on mutual respect, kindness, and care. We are committed to building, living, and extending a space of radical feminist practice that places care at its heart.
The UAL Decolonising Arts Institute (DeAI) seeks to challenge imperial legacies, ongoing colonial violence, and disrupting ways of seeing, listening, thinking, and making to drive cultural, social and institutional change. We imagine the Institute as a decentred, disruptive, evolving and porous space. As the Institute evolves, we aim to amplify local and global movements to decolonise and address the complex genealogies and geographies of postcolonial, decolonial and intersectional thinking and practice.
Image credit: Obentō no Jikan, Otomi Larcher, 2022 MA Graphic Communication Design, Central Saint Martins, UAL