Tactical storytelling and paradoxical failure: Writing, knowledge-making and the public humanities

Abstract

<p>Writing is central to acts of public communication: the exchange of text transforms workplaces and communities. Despite the rise of generative artificial intelligence that threatens to automate text creation, and the ongoing devaluing of the creative arts and publishing industries, acts of writing will remain central to public life in the future. Raewyn Connell, in her history of the higher education sector, <i>The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It's Time for Change</i>, argued that 'universities educate the professions on which public health, public education and social services rely'.¹ These critical professions operate, as all professions do, through acts of writing. Writing is transformative for the writer as well as the reader, and it has long been recognised as a method of inquiry.² As writing studies takes a social justice turn in concert with wider social trends, acts of representation are increasingly understood as having ethical and political dimensions.</p>