Writing is essential to the making of new knowledge as it enables the communication of research across configurations of time and space. However, writing may also close down possibilities of making new knowledge. In this chapter, we reflect on the production of a book on postgraduate writing that we co-edited (see Thesen and Cooper 2013). The book originated within a collaborative research project established at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Higher Education Development. The Centre’s role is to enhance the quality of teaching and learning in the university, and to advance the theoretical and practical understanding of these processes. The research that led to the book arose out of a concern with how postgraduate students’ researchwriting voices are enabled or constrained by dominant academic writing practices. We became aware that the writing-related challenges encountered by research students were not solely a legacy of South Africa’s apartheid past, or an ‘African’ phenomenon, but were part of a broader concern. The project was, therefore, widened to include colleagues from elsewhere in Africa, and from the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. The two of us (both based at the time at the Centre for Higher Education Development, and with our respective backgrounds in language and academic writing practices, and in adult education) took the lead in conceptualizing the framework for a book that we hoped would involve a global dialogue around postgraduate writing and pedagogy.

In this chapter we write a meta-reflection on the knowledge-making processes involved in putting the book together. We focus on how we, and the contributors, developed a novel conceptual frame with a reworked notion of risk at its centre, in order to understand what is at stake in the interplay between the production and reception of research writing.

The book draws on a research and development project on the barriers that writing-based practices present to the successful completion of postgraduate research and, in particular, on the struggles that students experience to find a voice in the writing of their research. All the contributors shared a common starting point: a view that was critical of the technicist ‘how to’ approaches to research writing.