Centre for Writing Studies (CWS) at JGU is devoted to developing interdisciplinary writing pedagogy for the university, to nurture a community of critical and creative writers within JGU and outside. To this end, we continue to build an ecosystem of institutionalised writing support through teaching, writing consultations, organising workshops and thematic events.
At CWS, we focus on academic writing as a means of knowledge production, rather than as mere technical proficiency. Our unique workshop pedagogy, driven by the interdisciplinary profile of our faculty, engages with teaching practices that bring imaginative play, intellectual rigour, and creative exploration to the process of reading and writing. Rooted in an environment of both rigour and care, our pedagogy fosters writing as a tool to critically enquire into the relationship between the self and society, which constitutes the very foundation of transformative education.
CWS teaches core introductory and advanced academic reading and writing courses in undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral programmes across schools at JGU. The faculty also offers a diverse range of electives based on their disciplinary expertise ranging across creative writing, politics of urban space, politics of representation, visual thinking and arts practice, among others. CWS faculty also conduct focused workshops which break down different elements of writing, open to the larger student community in the university.
A critical aspect of our work at the CWS is to broaden the discourse on academic writing by locating its process more firmly within its creative, socio-political, and affective contexts. The large number of student workshops that CWS has conducted in public universities across India since 2018 as well as our experience in training faculty in methods of writing pedagogy is a testimony to this. We look forward to intervening in the conversation on writing pedagogy through collaborative research, facilitating dialogue between teaching communities, and conducting student workshops and faculty training, given its deeply felt need in the landscape of higher education in India.
Director: Madhura Lohokare
Additional Director: Shubhashree Bhattacharyya
Assistant Director: Shachi Seth
Centre e-mail: cws.oefl@jgu.edu.in
