PGR Training Workshop: Criticality and Creative Practice

In-person training event for practice-based PGR students in Scotland, funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities.

Led by English & Creative Writing supervisors at the University of Strathclyde, this training event is aimed at supporting practice-based students at Scottish HEIS, across all creative subject areas,with the critical component of their doctoral thesis.

For creatives based in academia, developing sound critique is essential to our practice. While successful doctoral applications are built upon thoughtful critical frameworks, during the PhD itself the critical component of a practice-based thesis can fall to the wayside or feel like a ‘supplement’ to the creative work. We aim to reposition critique as the foundational impetus of what we do as practice-based researchers.

Designed to support practice-based students at all stages of their degree, this training aims to demystify the critical component and situate its importance within wider issues of scholarship — from research integrity to interdisciplinarity and public engagement.

Provisional schedule:

12:00 - arrival (tea/coffee provided)

12:15 - introduction

12:30 - Panel and q&a session: What criticality means for creative practice? (Sophie Jones, Sarah Bernstein, Laura Haynes)

13:30 - Lunch (provided)

14:15 - Workshop (small prep required, see below)

15:15 - Break

15:30 - Lightning questions session

16:00 - Talk from Early Career Researcher (tbc) + q&a

16:30 - Reflections and feedback

17:00 - Finish

Details:

This is an in-person event. Attendance is free to current practice-based postgraduate research students in Scotland. Students at SGSAH member HEIs may be eligible for travel reimbursal, so are advised to save their receipts (instructions about how to claim will be given at the event). Please register with your institutional email address and if you can no longer make the event, release your ticket so someone else can take your place.

'Criticality and creative practice' has been developed with support from SGSAH's Extended Training Allowance fund.

There is one element of preparation required for this training:

Please come prepared to talk for approximately five minutes in small groups about the critical component of your research. There are various ways to structure this. For example: you may choose to structure this as a short, informal talk; you may bring a sample of critical work to share; you may make a poster, zine or some other form of presentation material. The format is flexible: think about the best way to introduce where you're at with the critical component to a group of practice-based peers.

Any questions can be directed to maria.sledmere@strath.ac.uk and jessica.widner@strath.ac.uk.

About the organisers and speakers:

Dr Sarah Bernstein is a senior lecturer in English and creative writing at the University of Strathclyde. Her research focuses on literary difficulty and its affordances, and her journal articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and Essays & Studies. She is the author of three novels, including Study for Obedience, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Internationaler Literaturpreis. Her work has been translated into 16 languages.

Dr Laura Haynes is a writer, editor and academic based in Glasgow. She was co-director of MAP magazine (2011 – 2024) and at The Glasgow School of Art is leader of the studio-based interdisciplinary Master of Letters Art Writing postgraduate programme, where she also edits The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing.

Laura’s writing and research is concerned with autotheory and biomythography as poetics for critique. Publishing internationally, and across various forms, her work is published in journals including MuseMedusa: Revue de Littérature et D’Art Modernes (Review of Modern Literature and Art, University of Montreal), Journal for Writing in Creative Practice (Intellect) and magazines and presses including Sternberg, Freelands Foundation, Nothing Personal and MAP. With Prof. Susannah Thompson, she was co-editor of 'Art Writing, Paraliterature and Intrepid Forms of Practice', a special issue of the Journal for Writing in Creative Practice.

Dr Sophie Jones teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her research sits at the intersection of contemporary literary studies, gender studies, and the critical medical humanities. Her first monograph, The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959-1973 was published by Edinburgh University Press in December 2025. She is co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health (2022). She has also published on literature and ADHD, gender and autotheory, academic precarity, and theories of non-reproduction. Her latest research explores connections of disability justice and reproductive justice, with a current focus on cultural engagements with nausea and vomiting in pregnancy.

Dr Maria Sledmere is a poet-scholar and senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, where she is co-director of a new MFA programme in Creative Writing. She is managing editor at SPAM Press, one half of the performance duo Project Somnolence and the author of over twenty print publications including The Indigo Hours (Broken Sleep, 2025), Languishing, cute – with Ian Macartney (Tapsalteerie, 2025), Midsummer Song (Hypercritique) (Tenement Press, 2024), Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024), An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023) and Cocoa and Nothing - with Colin Herd. With Rhian Williams, she co-edited the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020). Maria’s work explores issues of ecology, digital culture, dreams and the everyday, often through practice-based and collaborative methods.

Dr Jessica Widner is a fiction writer, literary scholar, and lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. She is the Director of the MLitt in Creative Writing and co-director of the new MFA programme in Creative Writing. Her debut novel, Interiors, was published by the87press in 2022 and her short fiction has appeared in Extra Teeth, Gutter Magazine, and Ludd Gang. She is currently working on a critical book about contemporary South Korean literature and feminist movements, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2027, and a second novel.