This is a book about academic inquiry as a creative, generative process. It is also a guide to richly engaging writing and research in a fast-moving knowledge economy and increasingly unpredictable higher education environment. All researchers turn to writing to convey ideas, solve problems, figure out arguments, disseminate findings, and more. Despite academia’s ever-escalating emphasis on publication and innovation, however, occasions to develop written inquiry are largely limited to individualized feedback, usually near a project’s end. This ritual of reflecting on work-in-progress mostly at milestones of completion does us a great disservice: there are abundant ways to enhance and energize research in addition to review.

Unblocked guides readers in shifting, deepening, or selectively experimenting with their writing and research across the lifecycle of a project. Like a creative lab, idea kitchen, or workshop in book form, this volume offers tools, intellectual ingredients, and rhetorical practices for academics to work and play with, including when they may feel stuck. These approaches complement and augment academics’ expertise in their own fields, drawing on my hands-on work supporting faculty across North America with their projects-in-progress for many years.

Writing and research are alternately intriguing, frustrating, exhilarating, and tedious. Inquiry is perhaps most predictable in that its practice is difficult to predict. In this book, I respectfully consider the realizations and frustrations that academics have shared with me as a living archive of the twists and turns behind any research accomplishment. Rather than moving to immediately iron out unexpected turns, I treat these as important (if at times unwelcome!) occasions for insight – into a project and the broader contexts of our work.