Tips for Workshopping Written Work

Contextualise the paper. Take a couple of minutes at the beginning of your time to introduce what the paper is doing and the context of the research and/or output. (Also remember that not everyone will have read the paper).
Guide the audience. If you have specific ambitions for and/or problems with your text, ask for feedback on those aspects specifically.
Don’t feel you have to respond to every comment. You can note down people’s remarks and return to these later in your own time.
Consider bringing hardcopies. You might wish to bring along a few copies of your paper for people in the audience to read along with.
Approach the audience as your peers. This is a chance to think together with a range of differently situated scholars. Think about how you can get the most out of such an environment.

Read the paper! All AusSTS 2023 participants will be expected to read a selection of assigned papers ahead of the workshop, but we encourage you to read as many as possible.
Be generous with your feedback. This blog post by Joe Dumit has a helpful description of what “generous reading” can look like.
Feedback can take many forms. Good feedback might: clarify (“I think you’re trying to say…”, “I see the key argument as…”); extend (“you might find x concept or paper useful”); problematise (“could interpretation a actually be b?”, “does claim x hold up in context y?”); inquire (“could you tell me more about about x?”; “is there a reason you have approached y this way?”).
Respect the paper for what it is. It can be helpful to suggest angles that the author might not have considered, but make sure you aren’t trying to transform the paper into what you would want to write.
Remember that you have something to offer. AusSTS will bring together scholars from a range of different research areas, contexts, and experiences. Even if you are not an ‘expert’ on the topic, your perspective as a reader is still valuable.