(Interview with Comhghall Casey, Margaret Egan at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, 2017)
Call for Papers
The Future of Writing Centers
Ollscoil Luimnigh, Luimneach, Éire (University of Limerick, Ireland), June 11-14, 2024
The platform for the submission of abstracts is available and ready to access.
The deadline for the submission has been extended to February 19,17:00 Irish Standard Time.
The European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) is pleased to announce the 2024 EWCA Conference to be held on June 11th – 14th, 2024, at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Concurring with the 40th anniversary of Stephen North’s “idea of a writing center” (1984), the upcoming EWCA conference invites participants to take stock of regional and transnational directions in writing center research or practice and reimagine their futures. How have local practices or narratives impacted regional ‘Ideas’ of a writing center? And what might the future of writing centers look like in your center, region, or transnationally? We would like to invite EWCA members, affiliates and writing/writing center scholars world-wide to contribute to this year’s theme with research- and practice-based presentations, workshops, roundtables, performances, multimedia gallery submissions, and pecha kuchas. In addition to opportunities to network and exchange ideas informally, EWCA2024 will open spaces, time slots and other possibilities to meet within special interest groups.
Almost fifteen years have passed since Tracy Santa (2009), co-founder of the EWCA, reflected on his experience as a writing center administrator at the American University of Bulgaria, Blagoevgrad, as he struggled to reconcile the advice of US tutor training manuals with the local institutional and cultural contexts in Europe. A year earlier, Elizabeth Boquet and Neal Lerner (2008) examined the outsized influence of Stephen North’s (1984) “The Idea of a Writing Center,” which no longer aligned with writing center research and practice. Five years later, Jackie Grutch McKinney (2013) extended this debate, criticizing the “writing center grand narrative,” namely that writing centers are “cozy homes,” “iconoclastic,” and places that tutor “all students” (pp. 3-4), asking us to examine who these “ideas” of a writing center include and what practices or reimaginings they exclude. Recent studies of first-generation students, speakers of English as another language, and working-class students, for example, show that common writing center practices do not necessarily serve all students equally well (e.g., Bond, 2019; Denny, Nordlof & Salem, 2018; Eckstein, 2019; Salazar 2021; Salem 2016).
What assumptions or narratives are embedded in everyday practices, including the ones your writing center holds dear?
This conference invites participants to re-assess existing narratives that impact on writing center policies and practices and envisage new ideas of what writing centers could become in the future.
