all the organizing committee for inviting Lisa and me to participate in the 2010 IWCA-NCPTW Conference here in Baltimore.Lisa was, unfortunately, unable to be with us today, but this talk is very much a collaborative effort, one that grows out of a larger project which we have just completed.

When most writing centers in the United States were being founded and developed, colleges and universities had very few entities they labeled “centers.” Today, however, centers are cropping up with increasing regularity. At our own institutions, we have (between us) Centers for Humanities, Centers for Advanced Materials Research, Centers for Cognitive Studies, Centers for the Study of First Americans— even a Center for Epigraphy. It seems worth pausing to consider this phenomenon: Where are all these centers coming from, and why are they proliferating so rapidly? One strong possibility: Centers create spaces for the kind of work that needs to be done in higher education, work that is difficult or impossible to do within traditional disciplinary frameworks. In almost every case, for example, the previously mentioned centers allow for interor cross-disciplinary research and scholarship, and at their best they encourage highly productive forms of collaboration. Furthermore, they often initiate projects designed to bring college and community closer together. In short, these new centers seem to us one of the major signs of stress on old ways of taxonomizing and creating knowledge. Their growing popularity signals, we think, one institutional response to changing educational demands, populations, budgets, and technologies. We are well aware that these are difficult times at most community colleges, colleges, and universities, and that faculty and staff in many writing centers must spend an inordinate amount of time struggling to provide basic services. Nevertheless we wish to emphasize those opportunities that we believe are available to writing centers, even those that are in various ways marginalized on their campuses. The opportunities that we will discuss involve four potentials that we see for institutional refiguration: the refiguration of institutional space, of concepts of knowlWork Cited

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P]ower is, at its roots > telling our own stories. Without "good" stories to rely on, no minority or

Abstract: In this essay, we explore the intersections of rhetoric and feminism and the resulting transformations to both disciplines. Rhetoric offers feminism a vibrant process of inquiring, organizing, and thinking, as well as a theorized space to talk about effective communication; feminism offers rhetoric a reason to bridge differences, to include, and to empower, as well as a politicized space to discuss rhetorical values. The fraditional rhetorical canons, with their enthymematic familiarity, mark the sections of this essay, for they emphasize the mutually heuristic nature of the border crossings between these two disdplines. Although the linearity of print demands that we treat the canons consecutively, they, nevertheless, have a tendency to overlap and interact. Our discussions of arrangement, style, and delivery, for instance, both assume and depend upon a rethinking of invention and memory—a rethinking that recognizes the role that both these canons play in current efforts to reconceptualize and reenact what it means to know, speak, and write. As our essay argues, such attention to what we speak about, and how and why we speak, urges ail of us not only to continued exploration and interrogation but also to a renewed responsibility for our professional and personal discursive acts.

Why write together? the authors ask. They answer that question here, in the first book to combine theoretical and historical explorations with actual research on collaborative and group writing.Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford challenge the assumption that writing is a solitary act. That challenge is grounded in their own personal experience as long-term collaborators and in their extensive research, including a three-stage study of collaborative writing supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education.The authors urge a fundamental change in our institutions to accommodate collaboration by radically resituating power in the classroom and by instituting rewards for collaborative work that equal rewards for single-authored work. They conclude with the injunction: Today and in the twenty-first century, our data suggest, writers must be able to work together. They must, in short, be able to collaborate.

(1990). Rhetoric in a new key: Women and collaboration. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 234-241.

(1986). Why write . . . together: A research update. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 71-81.

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