Centerless? Making Sense of Disruptions in the Graduate Writing Center

Authors

Shannon McClellan Brooks, Pennsylvania State UniversityFollow

Abstract

This critical self-reflection is not a success story; rather, it is an effort of decolonial thinking that reckons with the idea, experience, and practice of centerlessness during pandemic-induced online transitions and operations in a graduate writing center (GWC). By tracing the contours of a series of interlocking disruptions the author and her graduate writing center community experienced during COVID-19, this article brings into sharp focus present colonial legacies inhibiting effective developments, moves, and adaptations to the GWC physical center space and praxis. Through retrospectively following pandemic-induced disruptions to her center, the author critically engages how epistemologies of coloniality and modernity cultivate a narrative of centeredness that unintentionally objectifies graduate writing centers and reduces them to disembodied artifacts of the institution. Ultimately, the author shares how the struggle with feelings of centerlessness—in space, practice, and ideology—provides insights into how we might move toward different, always emergent, and unrealized alternative relational praxis for decolonial and ecological graduate writing center futures. Rather than conceive of and experience the graduate writing center as a placed and institutionalized entity, the author imagines how the disruptions she felt with her center might instead suggest storying and practicing the GWC as a distributed interactional space.

Recommended Citation

McClellan Brooks, Shannon (2024) "Centerless? Making Sense of Disruptions in the Graduate Writing Center," Writing Center Journal: Vol. 42 : Iss. 1, Article 6.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.2053