Guest editors' introduction to The Writing Center Journal 42.1 (2024).

On archives and archival impressions, this essay extends archival research to the elsewhere and otherwise. The essay asks, how do we reposition the contents of archives so that we can position ourselves in relation to it otherwise? It puts forward a theory of (decolonizing) archival impressions.

This article examines connections among disability, colonization, university policies, and writing center work in North America. By positing that university policies have long mimicked medical and scientific processes for creating—and then discriminating against—perceived categories of disability, this article makes interventions into traditional writing center practices and pedagogies without dismissing the spirit with which these aspects of our field came to be. The article has several central claims: Disability has been constructed by nondisabled entities (including doctors, scientists, and institutions). Disability’s “drift” and myriad forms act as both specter and insidious insurance against progress or inclusive design. Writing center scholarship has consistently made claims toward equity yet still must reframe its points of engagement. Disability itself provides opportunities to reconstruct not only our relationships to one another but to our field and world. While these claims do situate writing centers (under the auspice of the institution itself ) as agents of colonization and control through their ableism and expectations for bodies, bodyminds, and identities, they also leave ample opportunity to imagine and build upon the values that shape our praxis. What can we imagine for one another, beyond accommodations and retrofits? What does a decolonized, disabled body have to offer? How can we find out?

This critical self-reflection is not a success story; rather, it is an effort of decolonial thinking that reckons with the idea, experience, and practice of centerlessness during pandemic-induced online transitions and operations in a graduate writing center (GWC). By tracing the contours of a series of interlocking disruptions the author and her graduate writing center community experienced during COVID-19, this article brings into sharp focus present colonial legacies inhibiting effective developments, moves, and adaptations to the GWC physical center space and praxis. Through retrospectively following pandemic-induced disruptions to her center, the author critically engages how epistemologies of coloniality and modernity cultivate a narrative of centeredness that unintentionally objectifies graduate writing centers and reduces them to disembodied artifacts of the institution. Ultimately, the author shares how the struggle with feelings of centerlessness—in space, practice, and ideology—provides insights into how we might move toward different, always emergent, and unrealized alternative relational praxis for decolonial and ecological graduate writing center futures. Rather than conceive of and experience the graduate writing center as a placed and institutionalized entity, the author imagines how the disruptions she felt with her center might instead suggest storying and practicing the GWC as a distributed interactional space.

This piece informs my journey of thinking and contextualizing the validity of autoethnography as a decolonial qualitative research method in writing center scholarship. This piece provides the lilt of everyday writing center initiatives, labor, and workings using five email exchanges as data depicting my interactions with various writing center stakeholders as a transnational writing center studies student-tutor, administrator, and doctoral student from South Asia, specifically India. This piece also argues how I used my experiences as one of a writing center’s personnel as a tool of empowerment in my liminal position in my writing center and elaborates on those experiences, broadening the scope of research trajectories and mediums within writing center scholarship using counternarratives in the existing literature.

Based on the concept of transformative listening by García (2017) that views listening as a form of decolonial work that must take place in writing centers, the article examines colonial thinking and contingency as toxic preexisting conditions of writing center ecology that hinder our ability to listen to marginalized multilingual voices. Recognizing the commonality between multilingualism and contingency, both as ignored marginalized intersecting identities in the hierarchy of the racialized and corporatized university system, the article describes the complexity of engaging contingent workers in decolonial work and listening. Further, it argues that contingency creates significant barriers to the type of antiracist and decolonial work that García calls for that cultivates transformative listening. The article proposes specific types of collaborative training and partnerships that writing centers should invest in to foster decolonial listening and work while addressing the material constraints faced by contingent faculty and staff.

In this paper, we explore the complicity of writing centers in the Global North in global neocolonialism despite its resounding rejection within Western writing center scholarship, in which Romeo García contends that writing tutors can be “decolonial agents.” We show that higher education is used by governments in the Global North as a neocolonial tool and situate international U.S. writing center initiatives within this context. Writing centers have remained complicit in global neocolonialism involving the commodification and exportation of American English as well as Western-style institutions, curricula, and pedagogies. This is most explicit in recent writing center initiatives undertaken by the U.S. Department of State in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Central and Southeast Asia. Our analysis of the IWCA and the global community of writing center organizations reveals that few institutions in the field are well positioned to address this important issue. Indeed, the IWCA has remained silent on the complicity of writing centers in the Global North in neocolonialism despite the resounding rejection of neocolonialism within the writing center community.