Creative Approaches to Academic Writing in Social Science and Humanities

Welcome to Creative Approaches to Academic Writing in Social Science and Humanities (SSH)

Description:

The purpose of the Creative Approaches to Academic Writing course is to provide insights into and experiences with different types of writing during the PhD process, as well as with various writing tools, techniques, and processes. The course focuses on how writing is influenced by both the stage of the writing process and the intended audience. Participants will gain an understanding of how to work consciously with their writing, how to make space for writing in everyday life, and how to structure the writing process by using different kinds of tools – including expression formats beyond text. The course integrates creative and audio-visual methods, as well as social and digital tools for reflection and peer feedback, all of which can support the writing process.

Learning Objectives - by the end of the course, participants will be able to: Integrate creative and audio-visual approaches into academic writing practices. Reflect on, critically assess, and apply different types of creative approaches in academic writing. Apply a variety of writing techniques and tailor them to their stage in the writing journey. Develop strategies for embedding writing into daily academic life.

Pre-requisites: 

Participants must be enrolled in a PhD-programme. The course is open to SSH PhD students from all disciplines and does not require prior knowledge of creative or audio-visual methods, but willingness to try the various methods.

Description of paper requirements:

It is expected that you submit a text between 5,000–8,000 characters (including spaces) plus references.

Programme outline:

The course is devided into 4 themes. The literature is distributed across themes and dates to ensure that we (teachers and participants) share a common frame of references for our dialogues. However, much of the literature cuts across themes.

Theme A. Writing Goals, Inspiration, and Output - Collaborative and Individual Writing Tools 

In this theme we will focus on how to make writing processes meaningful and explore different creative tools, techniques, and practices that help generate knowledge and support reflection – both individually and collectively. This also includes investigating different ways of structuring writing and setting personal writing goals and sub-goals for the course. Key dates: 24-25th of February 2026 – On-site sessions

Theme B. Writing with Visual and Creative Elements and Tools

In this theme, we will address how academic writing often incorporates visualizations, which can take many forms within texts – such as figures, tables, graphs, or drawings. We will especially focus on drawing, thinking with and about visualizations, discussing and designing them, as well as using videos and other audio-visual materials as tools to support the writing process, from idea development to dissemination. Key dates:10th and 24th of March, and 7th and 21st of April 2026

Theme C. Genres and Types of Academic Writing

This theme invites a joint dialogue about formats, dilemmas, and opportunities when working with different forms of PhD writing – from article-based dissertations to monographs, from literature reviews to empirical analyses and discussion chapters. We will talk about choices and omissions, argumentation and structure, as well as the quality criteria of academic writing across disciplines and what creative audio-visual approaches do to the specific projects – both potentials and barriers. We will also address writing and research situated in geographically and culturally varied contexts. - Key dates: 5th and 19th of May 2026

Theme D. Review Work in Academic Writing – Submitting, Giving, and Receiving Feedback/Feedforward 

The focus is on continuing your writing toward the goals set earlier in theme A, but also on moving from informal drafts to submitting written work. We will emphasize giving and receiving qualified written feedback (review) and revising one’s own text based on the feedback before resubmission. There is no fixed literature for this theme; instead, you will receive guidelines (templates) for feedback. You may draw on course literature where relevant, but your disciplinary expertise and personal writing goals are at the center. Peer review will be provided by fellow participants and the teachers. Keydates: The theme is primarily an asynchronous process, with two deadlines and one final online meeting: 21st of May 2026, 1st and 2nd of June 2026

Organizer: 

Rikke Ørngreen & Heidi Hautopp, L-ILD / ILD-lab, Department of Culture & Learning

Lecturers: 

Prof. Rikke Ørngreen, AAU

Assoc. Prof. Heidi Hautopp, AAU

Prof. Jenny Helin, Uppsala University, Sweden

On-site at AAU-CPH (Aalborg University, Campus Copenhagen, Denmark) 

Dates: 24 and 25 February 2026, 

Synchronous online sessions
(Tuesdays in the Teams channel)

Dates: 10th of March, 7th of April, 5th of May, 2nd of June 2026 – 13:00-16:00 – lectures and exercises

Dates: 24th of March 2026, 21st of April, 19th of May – 13:00-16:00 - facilitated writing

Asynchronous online sessions, with submissions

Date: 21st of May 2026 – Submission deadline at noon: paper / chapter for review

Date: 1st of June 2026 – Submission deadline at noon: peer review

Number of seats: 20

Deadline for registration: 3 February 2026

Important information from the PhD-school administration:

There is a no-show fee of DKK 3,000 for each course where the student does not show up. Cancellations are accepted no later than 2 weeks before the start of the course. Registered illness is of course an acceptable reason for not showing up on those days. Furthermore, all courses open for registration approximately four months before start of the course.

We cannot ensure any seats before the deadline for enrolment, all participants will be informed after the deadline, approximately 3 weeks before the start of the course.

For inquiries regarding registration, cancellation or waiting list, please contact the PhD administration at phdcourses@adm.aau.dk When contacting us please state the course title and course period. 

Thank you.

Literature:

Mandatory literature - initial list, more will follow:

Meier, N. & Wegener, C. (2017). Writing with Resonance. Journal of Management Inquiry, vol. 26 (2), (193-201)

Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2006). Doctoral writing: Pedagogies for work with literatures. In AERA annual meeting, 2006, San Fransisco (5-7).

Papen, U., & Thériault, V. (2017). Writing retreats as a milestone in the development of PhD students’ sense of self as academic writers. Studies in Continuing Education, 40(2), 166–180.

Lindstrand, F. (2021). A semiotic and design-oriented approach to affordance. In Designs for Research, Teaching and Learning (33-47). Routledge.

Badley, G. (2015). Playful and serious adventures in academic writing. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(8), 711- 719

Causey, A. (2017). Drawn to see: Drawing as an ethnographic method. University of Toronto Press., 1-24

Gilmore, S., Harding, N., Helin, J., and Pullen, A. (2019). Writing differently. Management Learning 50(1): 3–10.

Hautopp, H. (in press). Creative academic writing: A playful approach to knowledge production in Higher Education. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.

Hautopp, H., & Ørngreen, R. (2018). A Review of Graphic Facilitation in Organizational and Educational Contexts. Designs for Learning, 10(1), 53-62

Latour, B. (1999). Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest. In Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Harvard UP. Pp, 28

Ørngreen, R., Henningsen, B., Gundersen, P. B., & Hautopp, H. (2017). The Learning Potential of Video Sketching. I D. A. Mesquita, & D. P. Peres (red.), Proceedings of the ECEL 2017, Vol 1, (422-430).

Gosling, P., Noordam, B. (2022). From Data to Manuscript: Writing Scientific Papers That Shine. In: Mastering Your PhD. Springer, Cham. p.117-126

Ilyin, N. (2019). Writing for the design mind. Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Chap. 1-2