Nicast Episode 3: “Creative writing in academia”
with Erin La Cour and Marie Beauchamps
NICAst is hosted by Pepita Hesselberth, Joost de Bloois and Benjamin Schoonenberg.
The third episode of NICast features a conversation with Erin La Cour (VU) and Marie Beauchamps about the place and potential of practicing creative writing in an academic environment. Whereas La Cour’s research focuses on the pedagogical merits of comics, and their affordances with the field of graphic medicine and the medical humanities, Beauchamps uses creative writing techniques as a way of providing a new perspective on academic writing through organizing workshops.
This episodes’ conversation between La Cour, Beauchamps, Hesselberth and De Bloois deals with the following questions and topics:
- How to use creative writing as a pedagogical tool?
- How can experimenting with different modes of writing be a process of unlearning?
- How to do deal with the necessity of grading creative work?
- The potential of creative writing a as tool for inclusivity in the classroom
- Leaving academia and the possibility of working in academia from the outside
- The place of the humanities in public discourse
This episode’s guests
Dr. Erin La Cour is Associate Professor in English Literature and Visual Culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and co-founder of Amsterdam Comics. Her research focuses on both the intermediality and mediality of comics in several socio-historical cultural milieux, and on Graphic Medicine, the intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse on healthcare. She has co-edited multiple comics studies collections, including Key Terms in Comics Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) and Eisner Award nominated Graphic Medicine (University of Hawai’i Press, 2022). She is also a Comenius Fellow of The Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO), for which she conducted the project “Opening a Dialogue about Mental Health through Comics and Creative Writing” and is currently leading her ERC Consolidator Grant project that investigates how Graphic Medicine can offer new insights to improve healthcare training, practice, and dissemination.
Marie Beauchamps is an Amsterdam-based poet, creative entrepreneur, teacher, academic, and policy officer at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published extensively on citizenship and affective politics, and currently engages with questions of pedagogy and knowledge-writing practices in their relation to knowledge production. With MarieB. Atelier she organizes a range of workshop series on creative writing for academics, including Creative Writing for Academics, Storytelling for Grant Applications and Writing with a Poetic Lens.