A reflective, ethnographic study of a grassroots, antiracist educational workshop (The Conversation Workshops, TCW) reveals that writing center (WC) pedagogy and feminist invitational rhetoric’s (FIR) influence on TCW enables participants to recognize their own and their partners’ expertise, meaningful experiences, valuable perspectives, and their need to be listened to, accounted for, and understood. In an invitational model, particularly one based on a one-with- one, interpersonal dynamic, participants are more like collaborators than audiences, an approach that can be applied in diverse educational settings, and which reflects the WC’s model of one-with- one pedagogy. This dynamic also reveals one of TCW’s major limitations; the invitational model demands significant emotional and interpersonal labor, especially on the part of the initiator, which is only appropriate and productive in certain contexts. When combined with self-reflection, articulated positionality, and study of systems of oppression, writing centers can help facilitate antiracist community building by deploying their one-with- one pedagogical practices to call in accomplices beyond the writing center.

This article contributes to the ongoing discussion of student characteristics and usage/nonusage patterns in the writing center. Using a sample of 107 economics students from a selective, bilingual liberal arts program in Russia, the author finds statistically significant relationships among GPA, gender, English-language proficiency, and writing center usage. Namely, writing center usage predicts higher GPA and closes two achievement gaps related to gender and English proficiency. These findings complicate the picture presented by Lori Salem (2016), whose research showed gender, low SAT score, and being an English language learner to be strong predictors of writing center usage and produced a lively discussion about whether traditional writing center methods could be failing the students most likely to use the service. The present study suggests that while users may have less systemic social privilege, they also tend to be stronger students. As such, interventions should take care not only to address the needs of the students who actually visit but explore barriers to writing center access for nonvisiting students who are at the highest risk of dropping out.

Writing studies and writing center scholars have recently focused much-needed attention on how graduate student writers are taught, mentored, and supported. This scholarship also points to a persistent and stubborn conundrum: Graduate students must write their way into disciplinary belonging, yet most advisors lack a language for, or even awareness of, the specialized practices and tacit expectations shaping written discourse in their fields. While graduate student–serving writing centers help fill this writing-support gap, a reliance on English and humanities graduate students for staff reproduces a status quo in which the genre awareness and rhetorical vocabulary needed to mentor advanced academic writers are neither widely distributed nor recognized and valued. This essay offers the counterexample of a graduate writing center whose consultants hail primarily from master’s and doctoral programs in the sciences and social sciences. Using feminist social reproduction theory to examine this case study of one graduate writing center, the authors explore how multidisciplinary staffing resists the enclaving of writing process and rhetorical knowledge and points to a future in which the responsibility for mentoring graduate student writers is visible, valued, and shared.

This article showcases interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) writing center directors about their administrative work. In it, findings reveal that participant work distinctly departs from recent empirical writing center research about labor (Geller & Denny, 2013; Caswell, Grutsch McKinney, & Jackson, 2016), particularly in ways that practitioners’ invisible administrative work is informed and complicated by their LGBTQ identities. Across 20 interviews, participants communicated that their work extends to making queer activist space through their writing centers; to supporting tutors, students, and colleagues of all orientations with issues central to queer communities and mental health; and to navigating tense interpersonal terrain, especially bullying. In closing, the article calls for disciplinary responses and resources to make for more equitable labor landscapes for LGBTQ writing center practitioners.

Writing centers increasingly have been concerned with issues of race and racism in the center. However, most of the conversation around race has centered on student writers, with references to tutors of color given only in passing or in the context of larger discussions on race. This study uses interview data and a grounded theory methodology to examine the experiences of racism and anti-Blackness in writing centers for female Black undergraduate and graduate peer tutors, categorizing the experiences in three ways: attacks on character and identity, denials of credibility, and silencing. Connections are drawn with the experiences the tutors have outside the center, and the argument is made that the racial tension of their centers puts the women in a position of constant negotiation, performing a balancing act in which they must filter their responses to their racist encounters out of self-preservation. The results indicate that writing centers are not yet where the field and practitioners would like them to be and that much of the emotional labor of maintaining a tolerable work environment is falling to tutors of color. Writing center directors must do more to take back this responsibility and change the culture of their centers.

This article argues that religious and secularist identities complement and intersect in political ways with race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality and that they inform writing center practice because belief exists along a spectrum that involves all writing center inhabitants and affects all writing-centered conversations. We suggest that this spectrum of faith is evocative of the spectrums that theorists of race, gender, and sexuality in particular have discussed, yet often faith has been overlooked in discussions of identity in writing center work (Denny, 2010). We propose that theories of race, gender, sexuality and other identities that have served as springboards for professional development in writing centers can help to facilitate the development of a greater literacy of faith and secularism as complicated and nuanced identities. Specifically, we believe theories involving intersectional social justice work and hybridity can help to facilitate self-reflective and productive interfaith dialogue or dialogue about faith and secularism. Thus, such theories can help writing center professionals dismantle stereotypes about believers and secularists and problematic notions of what faith, or a conversation about faith, is or should be.

To our readers in 2020: we hope you are not experiencing inordinate loss. We write this introduction in the midst of multiple events resonant with historical import-and with the possibility for positive, lasting change: worldwide protests for racial justice, the U.S. Supreme Court decision against job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and significant attempts to save lives and jobs in the face of the ongoing pandemic. Amidst these events, of course, we are all engaged in conversations exploring how education will need to adapt.