I’ve just read a paper about epistemic placemaking. Epistemic placemaking is equipping and arranging places for knowledge work. The paper suggests that students might actively co-design the spaces they need, rather than simply inhabiting whatever institutional niche that happens to be there. The nub of the argument is that knowledge work is deeply entangled with the conditions of its production. Becoming a more capable knowledge producer (the authors call this an an epistemic agent) means developing a critical attunement to those conditions rather than treating them as neutral backdrop. This argument is highly relevant to academic writing – particularly if you’re navigating doctoral work or early career research.

Academic writing is, at its heart, a form of epistemic practice. When you’re writing, you generally aren’t just putting down ideas that exist elsewhere, fully formed, waiting to be transcribed. Writing is part of the thinking process. The page  or screen, or notebook, or voice memo in your car  is where knowledge gets made, tested, shaped, and sometimes abandoned. Which means the conditions under which you write are not incidental to what you write. They are part of the work itself.

Most of understand this,  at least partially. At some point we discovered that we could draft in a noisy café but couldn’t revise there, or that we needed music for generative work but silence for editing, or that writing at a particular time of day or in a particular notebook produced something different in us than writing at other times or in other media. We developed, in more academic-speak, embodied knowledge about our own epistemic geography. But we rarely named it as such, and perhaps still don’t or won’t! But the concept is worth thinking carefully about and developing deliberately.

Epistemic placemaking is a useful concept for writers. Here’s why. The authors of the papers, Carvalho and her colleagues, distinguish between two dimensions of placemaking: an interpretive mode, which involves attuning to how places work and what they do to us; and a constructive mode, which involves actively configuring, furnishing and curating places that serve our purposes. Both matter for academic writing practice.

The interpretive dimension asks you to slow down and pay attention to what different writing conditions actually produce in you, rather than assuming that the right conditions are simply those that feel most comfortable or habitual. Comfort and scholarship are not the same thing. Many writers have discovered that we do our best thinking in conditions of mild discomfort, slightly outside our usual groove, slightly estranged from the familiar. That’s because something about the friction seems to keep the mind alert. But the question to ask isn’t “where do I feel at ease?”No, it’s more useful to ask “what kinds of place, what kinds of arrangement, what kinds of ambient conditions seem to open up particular kinds of thinking?”

But it’s also more than that. It’s also about questioning the assumptions embedded in the institutions where we learned to produce knowledge, by the unwritten rules about what counts as proper scholarly practice. Academic writing carries inscribed values: the formal essay, the literature review, the passive voice, the carefully hedged claim. These aren’t natural features of the intellectual landscape but historical constructions that privilege certain ways of knowing over others. Epistemic placemaking, in the interpretive sense, involves seeing those constructions for what they are, rather than taking them as given.

The constructive dimension is more immediately practical. If writing is a form of knowledge work, and if the conditions of knowledge work genuinely shape its outcomes, then designing and maintaining conditions conducive to writing is a scholarly work. This means thinking seriously about time architecture as well as physical space. It means treating the ritual preparation for writing as part of writing, rather than needless delay. It means understanding that some kinds of writing work, such as generating, exploring, speculating, may need different conditions than other kinds or writing, such as refining, revising, structuring, cutting. And it means being intentional about creating the right conditions for each.

The paper also talks about the relational and ethical character of placemaking. The authors stress that epistemic placemaking is not just about configuring optimal conditions for individual productivity. It is also about working with others to create environments that embody values of inclusion, equity and care. What would it mean to take that seriously in academic writing?

Well, for starters, attending to the communities of practice in which your writing is embedded, and taking responsibility for how your own epistemic practices either open or foreclose collaboration. Who gets to contribute to the knowledge that shapes your work? Whose voices are you citing, and whose are you systematically not encountering because they fall outside the canonical streams of your field? What kind of epistemic environment does your writing create for the readers who will encounter it, does it invite them in, or does it perform a kind of authority that keeps them at a certain deferential distance? These are questions about the epistemic places your writing constructs and inhabits.

There’s also something slightly counterintuitive here for those of you in the middle of doctoral work. The advice you usually hear about developing a writing practice is about consistency, discipline, habits, routines, all of which matter. A lot. I’m not dismissing them. They are important. But there’s an equally important prior question… What kind of writer are you trying to become, and what are the material, temporal, relational and intellectual conditions that support that kind of writer? That’s an epistemic placemaking question. It asks you to think not just about getting the words out but about the kinds of knowledge work that produce writing worth reading. It asks you to take seriously your agency in creating those conditions.

The authors end by suggesting that epistemic placemaking ought to become a graduate capability, something universities actively help students develop rather than leaving to chance. Perhaps it also ought to be part of how we think about research training and academic development more broadly. Because the alternative, a generation of researchers who are technically proficient but unreflective about the conditions and assumptions shaping their work, seems like a real problem.

The message academic writers can take from the paper is deceptively simple. Learn to recognise and consciously curate the physical, temporal, relational, imaginative places where your best thinking happens. Then make sure you protect and sustain them. In the end, this is what it means to treat your writing practice as a serious epistemic enterprise. It’s really an act of care for the work, for the ideas, and for the readers whose thinking might be genuinely moved on by yours.

Lucila Carvalho, Peter Goodyear & Lina Markauskaite (2025) Epistemic placemaking: collective reimagining of spaces for more sustainable, equitable and inclusive futures, Higher Education Research & Development, 44:1, 163-177, DOI:10.1080/07294360.2024.2429473 (Paywalled)