Between war, languages, and anxiety: Notes on embodied academic writing

Abstract

Producing academic work under conditions of persistent anxiety, fragmented attention, and moral doubt is a practice suffused with tension. This essay explores academic writing as an embodied practice shaped by uncertainty, anxiety, and Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. As a Ukrainian scholar writing in more than one foreign language while living abroad, I examine how writing unfolds across languages and uneven positionalities—between proximity and distance to war, between privilege and responsibility. The essay engages with embodied writing as one facet of an unfolding living condition, not as a methodological choice. I explore how affective and sensory experiences—tensions, hesitation, and interruption—directly shape the writing process. I also critically reflect on the academic demand for experimental forms, highlighting the gap between calls for experiments and the lack of possibilities and infrastructures to support such work. By situating writing within the rhythms of mobility, precarity, and war, I argue that we should understand academic writing as a situated, embodied, and uneven practice, rather than a stable, “purely” research activity.