“Writing's intimate spatialities: Drawing ourselves to our writing in self-caring practices of love”

Abstract

This Commentary outlines four conceptual-spatial challenges of academic writing, and suggests an approach to navigating them. Academic writing, as feminist economic geographers argue, is underpinned by difference: emerging from and produced through different positionalities, differing access to stable employment and material, temporal and spatial resources, all set within structures of power and inequity—significant among them the neoliberal university. At the same time, for academics writing demands space in our lives: temporally, locationally, conceptually, and emotionally. Because these spatialities are potentially different for each writer each time we write and because they engage us spatially at a personal level, I term them writing's intimate spatialities, and suggest that care-fully navigating these conceptual-spatial challenges of academic writing stakes out a political position, one that may now be more important than ever: In an academic environment of neoliberalism and increasing precarity, I suggest that writing's prevalent emotional apprehensions may be able to be affirmatively conceptualized as a labor of self-care we come to with love.