Suffering-free academic writing: A workshop with Alexis Shotwell
Alexis Shotwell’s workshop will offer practical strategies for writing with less struggle and more ease. It will focus on managing anxiety, procrastination, and the pressures of academic productivity, as well as on finding a more meaningful relationship with writing as part of both thought and daily practice.
- Date
- 21 May 2026
- Location
- AVU Veletržní – Black Hall Veletržní 61, Prague 7
Many academics come to feel alienated from their own writing process. Too often, our capacity to write with ease, joy, and fluidity is crushed; this is sad, and also a pragmatic difficulty. Even for those who find writing easy, there is often some pain associated with it. Various technocrats want us to turn to LLM-based chatbots like Claude or ChatGPT to avoid this pain. In this workshop, we'll begin from the idea that writing is both a vital part of our thinking practice and an existentially demanding way to decline the invitation to soulless academic productivism. In this workshop, Alexis Shotwell offers some pragmatic strategies and tactics for writing with less suffering. Topics include: dealing with anxiety, procrastination, and panic about writing; finding meaning and purpose in writing; knowing when to stop; communicating well with people who can offer feedback; setting up support structures for writing.Registration deadline: 13 May. Please register here.For any questions, please send an email to cetep@flu.cas.cz or to the organiser Iwona Janicka (janicka@flu.cas.cz).This event is co-organised with the Doctoral Research Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU).