We have a guest, Philip Yeung, who talks about some of the academic writing he has done and is doing. Being critical and being creative were both important, and surprisingly similar. Both were and are also connected to leadership. Distributed leadership means listening to many voices; critical academic writing means taking account of many different voices. Being creative means doing something with those voices – developing your own theory or theoretical framework.
Just like a novelist will have many characters in the novel, but it still has one author (as the critic Bakhtin said – referring to this as heteroglossia), so, good academic writing will have many voices, each represented well by the author. We could say that typical academic writing, then, is a bit like a typical novel – many-voiced if single-authored. Philip stressed the public value of academic writing being many-voiced, critical, and creative. It responds to government and other powerful groups who often try to limit people to a single voice, a single point of view. So academic writing can give us agency in a power system. That’s a powerful message for us all!
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