Naming How We Feel: Specific Affect and Emotional Labor In the Writing Center

Writing centers are the locus for a wide range of emotional labor on campus, often serving students beyond the typical educational purpose. Naming How We Feel grapples with the question of how writing center administrators account for, train for, and theorize emotion and affect in the writing center to facilitate better and more ethical practices and considers how writing center administrators might ameliorate the costs of such emotional labor to faculty, tutors, and students.

Beginning with a discussion of how writing center scholars might identify and understand emotional labor, the book then expands to examine richly varied case studies and anecdotes to showcase how tutors tend to experience such labor and consider its relationship and association with emotional intelligence and burnout. Lawson considers how the field might better prepare and train tutors for affect and emotional labor, ultimately advocating for more equitable conditions for emotional labor within writing centers.

Naming How We Feel examines the critical role feelings play in writing and writing center work, offering advice on training tutors for emotional labor and literacy and suggestions for how administrators might engage institutional stakeholders to create and support more equitable conditions for emotional labor within their writing centers.

Daniel Lawson is professor of English and director of the Writing Center at Central Michigan University. His work on writing centers has appeared in WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis, The Learning Assistance Review, and Journal of College Literacy and Learning. He is the coauthor of Storying Writing Center Labor for Anti-Capitalist Futures with Genie Giaimo.