Axis Special Issue: Imagining the Decolonizing Writing Center

Burning Down the House (and Returning the Land)

Lindsey Albracht
Queens College

Keywords: Decolonization, Anti-oppression, Curriculum, Professional development

A few years ago, I worked as a Writing Center consultant in a graduate school of social work that had recently introduced a course for all incoming students called “Foundations of Social Work Practice: Decolonizing Social Work.” The course came from student and faculty demands to provide all incoming first-years with a more intentional foundation for understanding how power, race, oppression, and privilege impact the job that social workers do.

Using the interrogation of anti-Black racism as a lens that intersects with a variety of other systems to create oppressive conditions for the recipients of social work services, this course sought “to foster self-awareness and develop mindfulness practices; increase capacity to mitigate oppressive systems in social work agencies and organizations; [and] provide skills for community building within and outside the classroom” (“Social Work Curriculum & Requirements”).

Working in this center was a powerful professional development experience for me. I was impressed with the design of the curriculum as I could see it in the second-hand way that consultants do. I was invigorated by my discussions with students in consultations, and with colleagues in monthly professional development meetings. I met wonderful collaborators and thought partners. I saw knowledge transfer in action as students clearly applied the frameworks that Foundations gave to them to their field work and coursework in other parts of the program. I appreciated how the course gave us all a shared language.

Yet, the more aware I became of the land acquisition practices of the university where I was employed, the more my cognitive dissonance grew. Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, Breeanne Matheson, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang all call on us to resist co-opting the concept of decolonization as a metaphor that means something other than the return of indigenous land. And this university has a lot of land.

In fact, it happens to own one of New York City’s largest real estate portfolios (Warerker). Its astronomical wealth hoarding combined with some of the highest tuition fees in the country buy luxurious libraries, well-appointed classrooms, unparalleled research resources, and, of course, the services of Writing Center tutors like me. This land, which was likely taken under false pretenses from the Lenape people, is part of this university’s historical legacy (White). But this legacy persists. The school functions as a landlord-gentrifier in the neighborhood surrounding the campus. It has recently seized land by eminent domain (Bagli). And it manages that land (and the wealth that comes with it) to maintain its elite status. Land wealth is an enormous part of how this place continues to exist and function.

It is not meant for me—a white settler—or for any of us as individual people to determine what decolonizing a Writing Center involves. But it will likely involve a fundamental shift in the material conditions that sustain the kind of racial capitalist accumulation I’m describing: the kind that funds Writing Center work, even when that funding is inadequate. Decolonization will likely involve advocating for the return of indigenous sovereignty through movements like Land Back. As Itchuaqiyaq and Matheson remind us, decolonization will certainly involve examining our own motivations and their “colonial underpinnings,” and engaging Indigenous stakeholders in the work that we do (25). It is unlikely that decolonizing Writing Center work will leave the Writing Center, or the university, in a recognizable shape.

Decolonization is not a metaphor. It’s also not a workshop series, a professional development seminar, a tutoring technique, or “permission” to use languages that have been institutionally marked as non-standard. It’s not a center, or the work of most university-led committees, or a class. And it’s probably not a curriculum: even a good one.

I still believe that the work that was happening in the program and in that Writing Center was important. I just no longer understand it to be decolonial. As we burn down the house (Camarillo), we must attend to the land where it once sat in literal and material ways. If we aren’t doing that, we aren’t doing decolonization.

works cited

Bagli, Charles. “Court Upholds Columbia Campus Expansion Plan.” The New York Times, 24 Jun. 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/nyregion/25columbia.html

Camarillo, Eric C. “Burn the House Down: Deconstructing the Writing Center as Cozy Home.” The Peer Review, no. 3.1, Summer 2019, https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/burn-the-house-down-deconstructing-the-writing-center-as-cozy-home/. 

Itchuaqiyaq, Cana Uluak, and Breeanne Matheson. 2021. “Decolonizing Decoloniality: Considering the (Mis)Use of Decolonial Frameworks in TPC Scholarship.” Communication Design Quarterly 9 (1): 20–31.

“Social Work Curriculum & Requirements: Columbia School of Social Work.”  The Columbia School of Social Work, 18 Nov. 2021, https://socialwork.columbia.edu/academics/msw-program/curriculum/.

Warerkar, Troy. “New York’s 10 Biggest Property Owners. Curbed, 14 Sept. 2018, https://ny.curbed.com/2018/9/14/17860172/new-york-10-biggest-property-owners.

White, G. Edward. 2012. Law in American History: From Colonial Years Through the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.