Sunday, October 10, 2010

Seeking Your Input on the IWCA SIG on Antiracist Activism

Dear Friends,

The IWCA SIG on Antiracist Activism will be meeting at the upcoming IWCA/NCPTW Conference in Baltimore this fall. We have been meeting since 2007 and would like to gather feedback from participants (and future participants) about the work and leadership of the SIG. If you have a few moments, please click on the link below to answer a few questions. (If you do not see a link, you can cut and paste the address into your web browser.) Your answers will be anonymous, and the entire survey should take less than 5 minutes to complete.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W2VFZCL

In solidarity,

Moira Ozias, Beth Godbee and Frankie Condon

Friday, March 13, 2009

What Could Racism Look Like in our Writing Centers?

As we prepare for the upcoming 2009 ECWCA Conference, we're considering a new approach to Antiracism activism.

So we have to ask:

What could racism look like in our writing centers?

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Are We a "Nation of Cowards"?

While I'm not a fan of opinion columns, I think the summary provided through the NY Times link is a source for discussion.

Thoughts?

Monday, February 16, 2009

Are We All Plagued with the Inability to Self-Organize?

As an undergraduate writing center tutor, I recently (October 2008) had the chance to present a special interest group workshop (along with six other peer tutors) at the IWCA/NCPTW 2008 Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. We presented our experiences practicing Antiracist Activism at our writing center. While I could (and will soon do so) respond to the complicated variety of resistance we faced, I’d rather empathize with the invisibleness of most social justice work.

Our workshop was plagued, among others, with poor planning. Multiple presentations of social justice presentations, panels, or workshops, occurred at the same time as our own. Rather than coming together as a coalition of tutors interested in social justice, we were systematically separated and categorized individually as a result of our diversity in presentations.

While we could form special interest groups and committees forever into infinity, I’m concerned that we’re going nowhere politically. We are all marginalized voices and we need to stand together as a collective voice to respond to the political majority. Otherwise, we will become white noise to each other silencing ourselves through separate practices.

Perhaps the most difficult, most pressing issue in front of us is to decide how to effectively organize.

Keep writing!

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Linking up

Hello everyone!

Since our blog is lucky enough to have followers from different universities, I was hoping that everyone could post a link (which I will then add to the blog's resource section) to their writing center's website. I think it is important to remember that as tutors, Directors, and Assistant Directors devoted to social justice work, we are each others most important resource.

Thanks!

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

It is a new year.

This is my first semester away from a Writing Center. I want to know: how is it going? Have our antiracist conversations started yet? What are we doing OUTSIDE of our centers to promote antiracism?