Professional Development  Workshops:

Let’s Talk About Writing!

June 17, 2026

Organizer: Barbara J. Risman, Ph.D.

Founder, The Writing Guides

Workshop Descriptions

The 2026 WFRN 8th Biennial Conference Professional Development Writing Workshops are designed to help graduate students and early-career scholars develop the skills to be productive writers as well as researchers. The theme of these sessions is that each of us needs to develop an identity as a writer, despite few of us having been trained to be writers. No researcher can be successful without publishing, that is, writing about their results. The major topics to be covered during the workshops include how to get over writer’s block and the procrastination it creates, and strategies for how to work smarter, not harder. Questions from participants will guide more specific topics, from how to outline an article to writing about pedagogy or turning an article into an op-ed.

We anticipate holding two workshops:

Graduate Student Writing Workshop –  June 17 9am-11am (tentative).  This workshop is restricted to students currently completing their graduate-level education.  Preference of inclusion will be individuals who have not been accepted into the graduate student preconference.

Early Career Writing Workhop – June 17 1pm-3pm (tentative).  This workshop is restricted to work-family researchers in their early career stages and who have already completed their terminal degrees (such as assistant professors, post-doctoral researchers, and those on the job market).

Registration Information

To join these workshops, please follow this link to request participation

https://ithaca.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_a9pdqvKXw4HAPhs

Deadline for requests is January 15, 2026.  Space is limited.  Those selected into the workshops will be notified proximate to February 1.  All participants must become WFRN members and register for the 2026 conference. Owing to scheduling conflicts on the preconference day, participants in the Early Career Fellowship Program are not eligible to participate.

Barbara Risman

Barbara J. Risman is College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her most recent book is  Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (Oxford, 2018.) She is the immediate past Editor of Gender & Society.  Before that, she was co-editor of Contemporary Sociology and the Gender Lens book series.  Professor Risman won the  2024 Council on Contemporary Families Lifetime Achievement.  In 2023 she was awarded the Distinguished Lecturer Award from the Southern Sociological Society, and the American Sociological Association honored Professor Risman with the 2011 Award for the Public Understanding of Sociology Award. Professor Risman has been a Visiting Fellow at The Institute for Advanced Studies at Durham University in the UK, the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the  Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg  Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Germany.  She blogs about academic writing at www.thewritingguides.org and can be reached at thewritingguides@gmail.com.

Workshop Agenda

  • Writing Prompt: Your strengths and challenges as a writer
  • Developing a Writer’s Identity
  • Getting Over Writer’s Block
    • Spew Drafts
    • Imposter Syndrome
  • Hints to Work Smarter Not Harder
    • Organize that Article before you Start
    • From Teaching to Writing about Pedagogy
    • From Service to Writing about Higher Education
    • From an Article to an op-ed