The words in the title of this presentation were spoken by a doctoral student at the end of the first thesis writing bootcamp we ran in 2014. Since then, the learning centre where we work runs two annual weekend bootcamps. These words are significant in that they attempt to articulate the somewhat mysterious (to participants and facilitators alike) effects of a specific literacy event: the thesis writing bootcamp. While thesis writing bootcamps and other literacy events aimed at encouraging the productivity of doctoral students have become popular in recent times, little research has been carried out to investigate why it is that putting 60-odd PhD students in a room for two or more days would be so enthusiastically embraced by the students.
In our presentation, we draw on Bucholtz and Hall’s (2016) discussion of embodied sociocultural linguistics to understand what students experience in the bootcamp that makes them regularly set aside three days for writing in a large space alongside peers. We argue that the materiality of the room and the spatiality of the bootcamp itself cannot be ignored in the shaping of the students and facilitators’ ‘magical’ experience of writing in the bootcamp. While thesis writing is produced in the bootcamp, the bootcamp’s ‘magic’ produces writing and writers. The writing bootcamp as literacy event fundamentally poses a challenge to the traditional student-supervisor dyad which embodies an unequal power relation, typically enacted in the supervisor’s office. In the bootcamp, the proximity of bodies at shared tables and the interconnection of computer cables and power points evoke Wohlleben’s (2016) account of how trees in forests communicate and care for one another. Within this perspective, the provision of food, yoga sessions, individual writing consultations and silence itself are all afforded roles, and notions of care and boundaries are examined. As Bucholtz and Hall argue, ‘the body is imbricated in complex arrangements that include nonhuman as well as human participants (p.186).
References
Bucholtz, M. & Hall, K. (2016). Embodied sociolinguistics. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates (pp. 173-197). Cambridge University Press.
Wohlleben, P. (2016). The Hidden Life of Trees. Black Inc
