Many of you will have seen on Twitter that we have reached the end of out University of Exeter Alumni Annual Funded Supporting PGR Writing Project. But never fear – the practice, and the community it has created, is here to stay. You will have noticed a number of changes over the past few months – a rebranding as Shut Up and Write (SUAW), a new name and logo for the Microsoft Team, a new webpage, and a new Twitter account. In response to MANY requests, we’ve even got our own T-Shirt, which you can now purchase from Inkthreadable (sold at cost price!). These changes are to help us – and by us I mean tour amazing PGRs – better communicate what we do to University of Exeter PGRs, and the rest of the sector.
As part of this, I will be working with members of the SUAW community to write a collaboratively authored journal article. This article will share the initial aims for the project, and how it changed and evolved due to a) COVID-19 and b) the PGR community. A large portion of the article will be auto-ethnographic stories and lived experiences of the PGR community, and the impact SUAW has had on them and their research.
To prepare us for our first ‘writing day’ on Thursday 26th August (email k.preece@exeter.ac.uk if you would like to join us!) we are asking the SUAW community to describe SUAW in 3 words. We are using Menti to collect and visualise the responses, and will use them alongside a literature review to develop collaborative writing tasks for the day. So we have a request – can you describe SUAW in 3 words for us please? So far we have 30 responses and some themes are already developing. Given we have over 200 members of the SUAW ‘team’, we would love to get over 100 responses to give us some robust, representative data to work with. Here’s what we have so far…
I want to end by sharing my heartfelt thanks to the PGRs who have embraced SUAW as their own, and made it in to the kind of vibrant, supportive community we couldn’t have imagined when the project started. The impact these sessions have had, especially during COVID-19, has been transformational. The journal article is being written collaboratively to truly represent what this project has been – a collaboration, made possible by our amazing PGRs. Thank you.
Kelly Preece, Researcher Development Manager