This mixed-methods study sought to better understand how confidence in writing and race interact as factors within writing centers. Students utilizing our writing center were asked to provide data about racial identity and writing confidence both when registering with the writing center and when completing postsession surveys. From this data, we interviewed a racially representative pool of respondents to better understand their definitions of confidence and the identity factors that have shaped their confidence in writing. Our survey data showed that students’ confidence increased significantly as a result of a writing center session, replicating previous writing center research. Furthermore, we found that improvements in confidence were consistent across racial identities, with students from different racial backgrounds reporting comparable gains. Our qualitative interview results revealed how students struggle with both identity-and non-identity- based factors that lower their confidence in academic writing. Results offer a more nuanced picture of how student identity impacts writing confidence both within and outside the writing center.

Building sustainable infrastructure is a core principle of Constructive Distributed Work (CDW), an integrated approach to project management and team building. In this article, we explain the origins of CDW and describe the theory of sustainable infrastructure that underpins our approach to training, supporting, and coordinating work across a diverse and distributed team. We illustrate how mapping strategies can help us make infrastructure more visible, and therefore more available for reflection and iteration, and demonstrate how a participatory approach to developing and sustaining infrastructure helps our team maintain its commitment to more ethical and inclusive research practices.