Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement

In Radical Writing Center Praxis Laura Greenfield calls for a paradigm change in writing centers, imagining a field whose very reason for being is to facilitate justice and peace. The book calls on readers to more critically examine power and agency in writing centers and to imagine new possibilities for the field’s theories and practices.
 
Large, intersecting systems of oppression manifest in the everyday practices of institutions, classrooms, and writing centers. Local practices in turn influence the surrounding world. Radical Writing Center Praxis therefore challenges the writing center field to resist assumptions of political neutrality and instead to redefine itself in terms of more explicit ethical commitments. In this paradigm it is clear that to engage in anti-oppression work is not merely a special interest but rather a vital interest to all.
 
Introducing the concepts and vocabulary of radical politics, Radical Writing Center Praxis examines the tensions between the field’s professed beliefs and everyday practices and offers a process by which the writing center discipline as a whole might rebuild itself anew. It will be invaluable to writing center directors, tutors, scholars, and students as well as to administrators and compositionists.
 

Laura Greenfield is the founding director of the Transformative Speaking Program and a faculty associate of communication and education in the School of Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of language, power, and education, with a particular focus on race and gender. Her first book, Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change (USUP 2011), with Dr. Karen Rowan, was the winner of the 2012 International Writing Centers Association’s Outstanding Book Award. Previously she served as the founding director of the nonprofit Women’s Voices Worldwide, Inc. and as associate director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at Mount Holyoke College, where she brought its Speaking, Arguing, and Writing Program into international prominence.