Axis Special Issue: Imagining the Decolonizing Writing Center

Writing Centers as Spaces of Care: Reflections and Possibilities

Brie Winnega Reamer
The University of Texas at Austin

When I started reading about feminist care ethics this fall, I began to think about care in every part of my life.

By night, I poured over books by Joan Tronto, Nel Noddings, and Virginia Held. By day, I perched in my corner of our shared writing center office, chatting with the other administrators about a recent handful of messages from consultants. The messages alerted us to some problematic consultations: a writer who seemed too interested in working with a single consultant and a virtual consultation attended by both the writer and her mother, to name a few. When other admins proposed offering a training session to address these scenarios, I volunteered. These, I thought, were problems of care.

At the center of this training session was the idea of reframing writing center work as care work and asking our consultants to do this with me. Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto write that caring “includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Fisher and Tronto 40). Thinking about care in these rather broad terms, I believed consultants could readily identify forms of care taking place in our writing center.

More importantly, I hoped that once our consultants identified care, they could talk about it, emphasize it—value it. As Tronto writes, “The world will look different if we move care from its current peripheral location to a place near the center of human life” (101). Tronto isn’t really talking about writing centers in her book, but she isn’t not talking about them, either. So I went with it. This concept of moving care from the periphery to the center helped me design a workshop that was partly theoretical, mostly experimental, and entirely collaborative based on what the few consultants in attendance were willing to share—which turned out to be quite a lot. As I suspected, writing consultants are full of care.

What I learned from offering a workshop on care to a bunch of writing tutors is that presenting theoretical principles and asking consultants to make them concrete turned out to be less challenging than I anticipated. When I asked them to tell me about how tensions can arise in performances of empathy, one tutor shared that being an empath meant certain topics in a writer’s paper could make her uncomfortable. Likewise, when asked how care functions more generally in the writing center, consultants defined care as holding space for others, validating a writer’s emotions, and verbally acknowledging if/when someone chooses to be vulnerable.

This might serve to demonstrate that the language offered to us by feminist care ethicists is reasonably accessible and easy to employ. But I also think it means that our writing center is already endorsing tutoring pedagogy that centers care ethics—just…not so explicitly.

After all, when writing center administrators ask incoming consultants to decide how their pedagogy can negotiate imbalances of authority in consultations, what we’re teaching them is not all that different from Virginia Held’s argument that asymmetries of power in caregiving need not necessarily result in violence (121). We would do well to ask our consultants-in-training what it might look like to traverse the line between authority and domination, to ask them what they think about Eva Feder Kittay’s argument: “Inequality of power is compatible with both justice and caring, if the relationship does not become a relation of domination” (38-39). Approaching discussions of authority with the context of care ethics offers a whole other host of rich questions: How can a tutor negotiate with their own authority while recognizing that they derive from it the ability to respond to a writer’s needs? What might a leveraging of authority look like in the writing center, and when is such leveraging of power appropriate?

This is just one example of the many possibilities that live at the intersection of care ethics and writing center pedagogy.

Ultimately, discussing concepts of care ethics with our tutors helped affirm my working hypothesis that most writing centers are already doing care work; what I think is missing is the language pertinent to recognizing and valuing our labor in this way. What we sacrifice in neglecting to recognize care even as we perform it is the opportunity to also recognize and discuss the difficulties care entails, including caretaker burnout and the maintenance of boundaries useful in many care relationships. In short, we sacrifice an opportunity to theorize and implement better care for our consultants and for the students they serve.

Tronto argues that moving care to the center of what we do will make the world look different. But moving care to the center of writing center work requires that we talk about how care functions in the type of work we do. It also requires that we talk about what that different world should look like—how the world can work toward decolonization, anti-racism, anti-ableism, inclusion, feminism, and gender affirmation—and how we can use care and languages of feminist care ethics to help us get there.

Works cited

Fisher, Berenice and Joan Tronto. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring.” Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives. Ed. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson. State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 35-62.

Held, Virginia. "Can the Ethics of Care Handle Violence?" Ethics and Social Welfare, vol 4, no 2, 2010, pp. 115-129.

Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency. Taylor & Francis, 2nd ed., 2020.

Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge, 1993.