CFP: Dangling Modifier, Spring 2021
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There’s only ONE MORE WEEK to submit to the Spring 2021 issue of the Dangling Modifier.
Please share the below call for the Dangling Modifier and encourage your writing center consultants to submit to danglingmodif...@gmail.com by April 1, 2021.
We're happy to answer any questions & wish you all good health.
Megan and Andrea
Megan Titus, PhD
Rider University
Andrea Efthymiou, PhD
Hofstra University
Accessibility, Advocacy, and Activism Amidst a Global Pandemic: the Writing Center and Beyond
SUBMISSIONS DUE APRIL 1, 2021
It has been an exhausting year.
We entered 2021 in a prolonged state of chaos--still in a pandemic, surrounded by political, social, and economic turmoil. It is well-acknowledged that the collective trauma, mourning, and change sparked by the past year has impacted every aspect of our lives.
In this issue of The Dangling Modifier, we aim to shift focus from the pandemic itself to an investigation of the realizations and adjustments that have emerged because and despite of it. This time has completely rewritten the boundaries for work, school, and personal life, while revealing the ‘cracks in the system.’
As colleges and universities continue to operate virtually, students, tutors, and their families are faced with unprecedented obstacles, exacerbated by systemic injustices and institutional failures. In her recent work Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement, Laura Greenfield notes that writing centers “have an ethical responsibility to intervene purposefully” in the systems of oppression that circulate within our institutions (6). Despite these calls in recent scholarship, Greenfield also identifies how “the dominant discourses and practices of our field remain largely unchanged” (6).
At our current moment, when everyday oppression intersects with--and is exacerbated by--the pandemic, we call on writing center tutors to share their tools for survival, tools that have become necessary for flexibility and forgiveness. As we continue to interrogate and confront the systems around us, the writing center should be no exception.The writing center can be a resource for coping with difficult circumstances on all levels, a space for challenging ourselves and the institutions around us to think radically about the ways that we can emerge from this chaos with more sustainable, inclusive, culturally responsive practices. We adopt the vision set out by Kaidan McNamee and Michele Miley in “Writing Center as Homeplace (A Site for Radical Resistance)” in characterizing “the Writing Center as a homeplace where we accept the existence of intersecting oppressions, even if we are not socially positioned to appreciate the full scope of their extent and effect; where we understand that when writers and tutors come into our ‘cozy home,’ they bring with them the cumulative wounds inflicted by a world that prevents their healing."
In this issue of The Dangling Modifier, we invite writers to consider how our current moment has affected accessibility, advocacy, and activism in the writing center. Below are only a few examples of possible questions to address:
- Consider accessibility, advocacy, and activism, including but not limited to racial and economic injustice, disability rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. How has the pandemic shifted your experience or perception of these issues? How can injustices be addressed in the writing center?
- How can empathy be brought into the writing center? What does “too much” or “too little” empathy look like? How can the writing center be a space for refuge amidst all this chaos?
- Do you miss physical or in-person tutoring? How have platform changes and increased technology use affected your tutoring experience?
- What are the benefits and challenges of tutoring ELL (English Language Learners), international, and multilingual students during this time? How has tutoring changed for these students?
- How do we care for ourselves as tutors, especially in an at-home setting, while being a resource for students?
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
We honor students’ right to their own language and encourage individualized approaches to our call.
Submissions should:
- Be approximately 700-1000 words;
- Engage with writing center scholarship, or relevant inter-disciplinary literature, in some way;
- Use MLA citation method to document sources;
- Be submitted to danglingmodif...@gmail.com by April 1, 2021.
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Andrea Rosso Efthymiou, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Writing Studies & Rhetoric
Writing Center Director
National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, Treasurer
Hofstra University
122 Mason Hall
Hempstead, NY 11549
She | Her | Hers