Disruptive Stories: Amplifying Voices from the Writing Center Margins

Disruptive Stories uses an activist editing method to select and publish authors that have been marginalized in scholarly conversations and enrich the understanding of lived writing center experiences that have been underrepresented in writing center scholarship. These chapters explore how marginality affects writing centers, the people who work in them, and the scholarship generated from them by examining the consequences—both positive and negative—of marginalization through a mix of narratives and research. Contributors provide unique perspectives ranging across status, role, nationality, race, and ability.

While US tenure-track writing center administrators (WCAs) do not make up the majority of those who hold WCA positions in writing centers, they are more likely to be the storytellers of the writing center grand narrative. They publish more, present more conference papers, edit more journals, and participate more in organizational leadership. This collection complicates that narrative by adding marginalized voices and experiences in three thematic categories: structural marginalization, globalization and marginalization, and embodied marginalization.

Disruptive Stories spurs further conversations about ways to improve the review process in writing center scholarship so that it more accurately reflects the growing diversity of its administrators and practitioners.

Elizabeth Kleinfeld is professor of English and writing center director at Metropolitan State University of Denver. She has coauthored a textbook on multimodal and multigenre composition and also published articles on disability, inclusivity, writing center work, and student source citation practices and won awards for collaboration and accessible teaching. She blogs about disability at elizabethkleinfeld.com.
 
Sohui Lee is associate professor and faculty director of the Writing and Multiliteracy Center at California State University Channel Islands, where she founded the Writing & Multiliteracy Center. She is coauthor of Design for Composition and has published more than thirty articles and chapters in peer-reviewed journals.
 
Julie Prebel is associate professor of American studies, writing center director, and director of the College Writing Program at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She has published in top peer-reviewed journals and presents her work widely at national conferences in writing center studies, composition studies, and American studies.