Dr Amita Nijhawan

Biography

Amita is a Senior Educational Developer at the University of the Arts London. As a creative writer and dance studies academic, she mentors staff and students in bringing storytelling and creative writing techniques into their academic writing and practice, and in developing a writing voice. She thinks of writing as a process of discovery, where writers discover themselves through the act of writing. Decolonising academic writing through telling your story can expand who gets to write, how they write and what they get to write about. Like any other art form, writing is a parctice, a discipline, an art and a job, and the muse needs to be chased; it doesn't wait around trying to find us. If you're working on a research paper, book or artistic work, contact Amita for a chat, and check for updates on a staff writing group.

Amita mentors staff and students in embedding social justice into HE and the arts industries. Decoloniality and social justice need an understanding of colonial histories but also the colonial present. These approaches need us to think about how we are all implicated in imperial practices that create and thrive on a matrix of privilege and deprivation. Amita's approach is collaborative and conversational, and she understands the work of social justice as creative, partial and on-going, where power flows and shifts.

Amita's student-friendly resource Debunking Decolonisation and her Framework for Student Partnerships and Co-Creation are available to use by teams and courses. (See links below.)

Amita has lectured, led courses and supervised dissertations in creative writing and dance studies in the UK and USA. Her research has appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, Media/Culture and South Asian Popular Culture Journal, and creative writing in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Aesthetica, Wasafiri, Brand, J-Journal: New Writings on Justice, Berkeley Fiction Review and the Hawaii Pacific Review. Her novels are published by HarperCollins. Her writing explores how unexpected or othered bodies disrupt hierarchies.

Amita has held writer-in-residence roles as a fiction writer at University College London through a Leverhulme Grant. At Plymouth University, through a partnership with Literature Works. At the British Council, as a Writing Beyond Borders Mentor. And at Spread the Word, an agency that develops literature (and diversity in literature) across London.

The Framework for Student Partnerships and Co-Creation can be found here: https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/453201/Framework-for-Student-Partnerships-and-Co-creation-at-UAL.pdf

Debunking resource: https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0030/463395/Debunking-Decolonisation-Staff-Student-Resource-2024.pdf

Read a blog post on an international Decolonising Academic Writing project: https://decolonialdialogue.wordpress.com/2024/02/05/decolonising-academic-writing-enacting-a-self-in-and-through-writing-part-1/

Read a blog post in response to the Decolonising series at York St John here: https://blog.yorksj.ac.uk/tatlblog/2023/12/11/how-do-race-and-imperialism-form-the-fabric-of-our-education-systems-reflections-on-discussing-decolonisation-with-dr-adam-elliott-cooper-and-dr-amit-singh-27-11-23/