2024 MAWCA Conference Keynote Address:
building community during the apocalypse
Dr. Eric Camarillo, Tarrant County College
Writing centers sit in between things: between faculty and students, service and discipline, student affairs and academic affairs, administration and employees, and so on. Despite this liminality, or maybe because of it, writing centers excel at anticipating student needs and creating connections between people. These connections have never been more important as crises abound. Between global pandemics, ongoing systemic racism, an increasingly urgent climate crisis, skyrocketing inflation, endless school shootings, the potential dawn of World War III—going to work to talk about writing can feel almost inconsequential. Hopeless, even. But writing centers sit between things and, often, they sit between people, connecting students to the resources they need, connecting writing tutors and staff to each other, and finding increasingly innovative ways to build community during the apocalypse. This talk will center on the importance of building community, the history writing centers have of connecting people and diversifying our spaces, how communities can be built in different modalities, and how the work of writing centers can operationalize hope in increasingly hopeless times.
About Our Speaker
Dr. Eric Camarillo is the Dean of the Learning Commons at Tarrant County College's Northwest campus, providing vision and leadership to the Library and Learning Support Services. In this role, he contributes to one-college Learning Commons model, standardizes operating procedures across all five physical campuses, and spearheads innovative assessment efforts. Previously, Eric acted as Director of the Learning Commons at Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC), overseeing testing, the library, tutoring, and user (tech) support across all five of HACC’s campuses.
Eric’s research agenda is currently focused on writing centers and best practices within these spaces, antiracism as it applies to writing center practices, and how these practices change in asynchronous and synchronous online modalities. He has published in WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and The Journal of Academic Support Programs. He has presented his research at numerous conferences including the International Writing Center Association, the Mid-Atlantic Writing Center Association, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication. He is the current Vice President for the South Central Writing Centers Association, the former President of the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, the Book Review Editor for The Writing Center Journal, and serves on the conference committee for the Online Writing Centers Association.
Eric recently received his PhD at Texas Tech University's Technical Communication and Rhetoric program. His dissertation is on the feedback practices of asynchronous writing center tutors.