Featured Workshop
The conference kicks off on Friday, March 22, with a workshop from 3:30-5 p.m. If you plan to attend the workshop, please choose the Friday + Saturday option when registering for the conference.
Cost: $25 for professionals and $20 for students (added to the cost of registration for Saturday)
“Is this resistance?” Negotiating resistance narratives while caring for material lives in the writing center
Facilitators: Anna Habib and Esther Namubiru, George Mason University
Writing centers have historically been concerned with the ways unjust and inequitable social and institutional ideologies and practices harm students (e.g. the impact of standard language ideologies on linguistically-minoritized students). As a result, writing center administrators often feel compelled to explore strategies for resisting these external forces in the writing center space (e.g. the uptake of linguistic justice frameworks in the writing center tutorial). However, how do consultants negotiate theirs and their student writers’ material lives with the ideological stances and resistance narratives they are exposed to in consultant training? And to what degree does this resistance narrative, while well-intentioned, create unforeseen emotional labor and cognitive dissonance for our consultants and student writers? To begin responding to these questions, the facilitators of this workshop use an international writing center lens that draws on their editorial work on the Connecting Writing Centers across Borders blog and their conversations with global writing center professionals on the Slow Agency podcast. The workshop will guide participants in exploring scenarios that complicate resistance narratives and invite participants to brainstorm alternative approaches to serve students without compromising resistance values or community care principles.
About the Facilitators
Anna Sophia Habib serves as lead Editor forConnecting Writing Centers across Borders, a blog of WLN: a Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. She also co-hosts Slow Agency,a podcast about writing and writing centers, with Esther Namubiru and Weijia Li.
She is the former associate director of Mason’s writing center and the current associate director of Composition, managing the undergraduate composition courses designated for multilingual students at Mason's home campus and branch campus in Songdo, Korea. Anna holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and after ten years as a part-time PhD student, she will finally graduate with her PhD in Writing and Rhetoric this spring. Her research focuses on the lived experiences of language, particularly the effects of war, displacement and immigration on translingual and multilingual identities and practices.
Anna serves as Associate Editor for the WAC Clearinghouse's International Exchanges on the Study of Writing book series.
