Storying Writing Center Labor for Anti-Capitalist Futures

Rooted in storying and testimony, Storying Writing Center Labor offers an inclusive, theoretically grounded, labor-oriented approach to writing center scholarship and praxis. While emotional labor and other wellness-related topics have long received attention in the field, issues of precarity, austerity, workism, and related concerns remain under-examined. Marrying ethnography and storying to uncover trends and circumstances related to writing center labor, this book offers insights into the lived working experiences of writing center professionals along with actionable items for creating just, sustainable, and intentional workspaces. Importantly, Storying Writing Center Labor tackles long-established labor issues in the field that have been and continue to be exacerbated by higher education’s austerity politics and reliance on disaster capitalism to inform decision making.

Genie Nicole Giaimo is assistant professor and director of the Writing Center at Middlebury College in Vermont. The author of over two dozen peer reviewed articles and chapters, their work has been published in Praxis, Journal of Writing Research, The Journal of Writing Analytics, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Research in Online Literacy Education, Kairos, Across the Disciplines, The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and several edited collections. They are also the editor of Wellness and Care in Writing Center Work, an open-access digital book with WLN: A Writing Center Journal.

Daniel Lawson is Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at Central Michigan University. His work on writing centers has appeared in WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis, The Learning Assistance Review, and Journal of College Literacy and Learning. His work on media studies, games, and comics has appeared in Journal of Comics and Culture and Studies in Comics as well in edited collections such as Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age, Critical Insights: The American Comic Book, and The New Work of Composing. His research interests revolve around affect, labor, transfer, and reflection in the writing center.