When I pitched this book, I was talking about not just writing center directors or administrators, but tutors … because we’re with our tutors more than we’ll ever be with a single writer. We watch them grow from year over year. And so this to me is a chance to think about how do we invest in and support our student workers across the college or university space.

Slow Agency is back with another round of insightful conversations about writing, writing centers, and the people who make them work for students. On this episode, we invited Dr. Genie Giaimo to help us unpack the meaning of an un-well writing center, which she writes about in her book Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond. Dr. Giaimo also shared systematic measures that writing center directors can take to ensure that their risk management and emergency plans prepare them for unforeseen crises and go beyond commodified self-care. 

For listening on your mobile devices, find Slow Agency on Anchor, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Esther Namubiru: Welcome listener.

[00:00:03] Our guest today is Genie Giaimo. We’re discussing her new book. Unwell writing. Centers Searching for wellness in neo liberal education and beyond The first half of our conversation Focuses and writing center directors and how they can prepare. prepare their programs for crises In the second half we think about personal applications.

[00:00:24] Genie, what are the different dimensions of wellness that you cover in the book?

[00:00:30] Genie Giaimo: I think of wellness very broadly, it’s not just about self care or talking about mitigations of burnout, I also think about wellness as a larger structural question of an institution. Is an institution well? Is a center well? What are the practices like? And , if we kind broaden out that definition of wellness, we can think about, are we safe?

[00:00:54] How safe can we be given what we experience today and all across the country and then of course in the world what kinds of emergency plans do we have, what kinds of processing do we do after a traumatic experience, what kinds of training do we have for microaggressions or different kinds of issues that are related to the day to day work that we do that maybe aren’t really talked about as much in the center?

[00:01:19] And I’ve worked at several writing centers, and I’ve seen a lot of different ways in which, as I think I wrote this, the world comes into the center. And so how do we think about what not only we can do, but what our institutions can do to prepare us for this work, protect us in doing this work and then also processing this work, which I think is sometimes left out.

[00:01:44] Esther Namubiru: So you’ve tried to expand from the very personal level of self care to more of an institutional and systemic level. And when you say bringing the world into the center to me, it also sounds like you’re saying trying to get the human aspect of life, the humane pieces that, come with, all the difficulties of life and adding them into the policies that are meant to help us stay safe. Is that right?

[00:02:11] Genie Giaimo: Yeah, it is. Within my first, couple of months of running the Writing Center, a series of things happened that I write about, and I’m happy to talk about later, but I realized, okay, first I kind of dove into self care, and I’m like, but, but it’s really not just about us, right?

[00:02:24] We can’t control the things that happen in our institution. We can’t control how we’re treated, and so really kind of taking a step back from neoliberalism into questioning. What is our relationship to our work? What is our relationship to our institution?

[00:02:41] Anna Habib: And I’m hearing also echoes of Maslow’s hierarchy with just literally being safe and having access to food, shelter and security at the core of, our existence.

[00:02:54] we can’t really have that sense of belonging or that larger sort of community creative if we don’t have that foundational embodied feeling of safety.

[00:03:08] Genie Giaimo: I love that you bring up Maslow. Maslow has been a kind of driving force, both in this project, as well as in a project I’m working on right now, which I’m happy to talk about later, but yeah, I worked at a community college.

[00:03:19] That was my first job and the. The focus there was in some ways, the whole student, and there’s some good and bad in this, so I’m not going to say that this is a model that people should follow,

[00:03:30] but there was a food bank, there was child care for the students, different kinds of social care programs for, people like veterans and returning adult learners, and so in, in theory, that was A focus of the community college to, to work with the whole student and all of their unique economic personal circumstances.

[00:03:57] Did that always work well? Not necessarily. And yet, for me, when I came in, I saw more of the whole person in my tutoring work, both from a student side of who came in to the writing center, but also from a, Worker side. from the worker side, I started realizing my student workers were one flat tire away from not being able to work.

[00:04:20] They were one paycheck away from not being able to continue school. And so that sense of precarity, was on display all the time. that’s when I started thinking about how we think about not just the whole student but the whole worker.

[00:04:37] Genie Giaimo so I talk a lot about my community college experience because it was really A baptism by fire. I actually am a working class first gen person myself and I took community college classes. so I came in thinking I got this, I know what this is all about. and I just couldn’t have been more far from the truth.

[00:04:54] Genie Giaimo: my training did not prepare me. And I think I talk a little bit about this sort story of one of my. Students who becomes a tutor talking about folks coming into the well, at that point, a different tutoring center while under the influence. And I’m like, under the influence of what, I just had no, no conception that this happened for some reason.

[00:05:12] And yet what we found out is that not only did this happen, but there are actually a lot of incidents of things like drunk driving in the area of Massachusetts, where the school is located. There were a lot of persons that were not allowed on campus because of different kinds of. Security reasons several of my tutors struggled with being survivors of domestic violence.

[00:05:36] and of course, when you look at statistics, these things occur commonly, right? Addiction, mental health issues, domestic violence and abuse. But, I think the trust that people have in sharing that with you varies from situation to situation. My, my students who then became my tutors, We’re very open and sharing with me the things that were going on with them, and I felt a personal responsibility to respond to what was going on in their lives because I knew it was impacting their school and their work,

[00:06:10] Esther Namubiru: Genie, how would you respond to somebody who says, Hey, I’m interested in wellness, but I really don’t know that I need to be that aware of what’s going on with my writers.

[00:06:21] Genie Giaimo: What I’d say, first of all, I’m not like seeking this stuff out. I’m not like, tell me your. Most personal experiences in life. it’s coming up typically at work. so these experiences and trauma are always going to be occurring, right?

[00:06:36] And I say this as like a progressive, continuous experience. It’s not as if it disappears just because we don’t want to hear about it. a lot of the scholarship in our field talks about how do you help tutors to do their work better? Right? But what I’m really trying to posit is that

[00:06:51] a lot of times working for and learning at neoliberal institutions, we’re going to encounter trauma and that’s going to not only shape how we experience our work, but it might experience how we relate to each other.

[00:07:04] What kind of community are you building? with your students? no, we’re not therapists. No, we shouldn’t seek this out, but also it’s happening. And if people come to you and trust you, and even if they don’t, we ought to be responding somehow.

[00:07:19] Anna Habib: I have this quote from chapter six. That I think speaks to what you’re just saying and that I was hoping you could dig into a little bit. In that chapter, you’re complicating the idea of emotional labor. And here’s the quote. You say the ways in which we currently work in our society, which are impacted by neoliberalism, but also by disaster capitalism and constructed precarity all affect how we engage with work. What do you mean when you are saying disaster capitalism and constructed precarity and how these forces are impacting our work with students, but also our own emotional labor in the writing center? And I guess more broadly where does the writing center fit into this neoliberal landscape?

[00:08:15] Genie Giaimo: So I’m going to actually start with an anecdote. During the pandemic, the beginning stages of it, supermarkets ran out of food a lot, right? and then stockers were doing like ridiculous hours to restock things.

[00:08:28] After the pandemic, if you think the pandemic is over, the supply chains we’re all quote unquote broken, right? Why is that? It’s because we work at the margins of everything that we do the institutions that run most of our country including something like a food store or the distribution center or the trucking company are just at the bare place of keeping up with Consumption, let’s say. So, the stores don’t have enough food. The storage doesn’t have enough space. We’re working at that margin in not just all those industries, but also in higher education. And so, when I’m thinking about definitions of neoliberalism, which I offer in my book, it connects to the outsourcing of labor and Austerity measures among other things, the idea of disaster capitalism is that we’re always at this point of breaking apart and we can’t really respond without a sort of crisis.

[00:09:28] It’s always a crisis. And so in higher education think about how we run our centers, right? A lot of times we do the good work until someone comes around asking for data, it has to be due immediately, or there’s some sort of change in leadership and everything has to kind of be upended, right?

[00:09:45] So there’s always this, this little tiny margin of error because there’s not enough to go around. There’s not enough staff, there’s not enough capacity, there’s not enough cognitive load. So I think of this as like a supply chain issue.

[00:10:01] Anna Habib: Yeah, and like the fact that we, we’re just a margin away from crisis and we’re not building structures that are sustainable and with enough breathing room for the products to be created, but also for the humans who are creating these products.

[00:10:20] So I guess efficiency is the main thing that capitalism is looking for. Right. and we aren’t building these sustainable systems to help. Support that efficiency am I reading that right?

[00:10:34] Genie Giaimo: I mean, absolutely, but it’s not just efficiency. It’s also false scarcity. we actually have enough food it’s just not in the storage place and there are not enough trucks to get it to the store actually with institutions with high endowments, we have the money. We just don’t want to hire the staff or the faculty.

[00:10:53] so it’s, it’s a creative crisis, And when people start to saying to me now, now, now I say, why? I don’t say, okay, anymore. I’ve really changed in that, Everything was a crisis before someone can’t get a tutor, a tutor can’t work this and that. And now I’m just like, is it a crisis?

[00:11:12] Is this manufactured? Could we hire more people if we had more resources? Or another administrator. And then that kind of takes the heat off of me of thinking that it’s really my job to do the work of like four people where a generation ago I might not have.

[00:11:29] Anna Habib: So that’s what you mean when you say constructed precarity.

[00:11:32] Genie Giaimo: Yeah. And, and the busyness culture and the always having to do things to get your CV in order, I mean, you can follow it down a rabbit hole of more is more, And the question I now, again, ask is. Are we always supposed to be in a growth mindset? in our personal lives, in our professional lives,

[00:11:51] Weijia Li: And I think what you just said about, you know, as the Writing Center Director, I can decide that, no, this is not a crisis. We can get more resources. I want to circle back to, the book itself. Who are your intended audience? Writing center directors mostly, or? Is there anything else, anybody else you have in mind?

[00:12:17] Genie Giaimo: Yeah, so I think when I pitched this book, I was talking about not just writing center directors or administrators, but tutors.

[00:12:27] I also think any student academic worker could benefit from reading a book like this because what they experience in a writing center is more than likely something they might experience in a dining hall, or as a TA in a lab. And so there’s that student worker group that I think we ought to attune to more.

[00:12:50] Because we’re with our tutors more than we’ll ever be with a single writer.

[00:12:54] we watch them grow from year over year. And so this to me is a chance to think about how do we invest in and support our, student workers across the college or university space. And it could also move into things like coaching. or working with athletes, students that are high performing and might have a lot of stressors placed on them in their sport work.

[00:13:19] and originally I didn’t want it to say writing centers unwell, but Apparently it’s hard to search a single word. I’m interested also,

[00:13:27] Esther Namubiru: On the tools that you raised in the book, you talked about risk response plans, you talked about emergency plans, and you mentioned that the current emergency plans that you found at your location were insufficient. Tell us about that.

[00:13:42] Genie Giaimo: So good. So I was actually doing another interview about this book and It was two days before we got a false active shooter alert where the institution did not respond in a way that the community wanted. And you can decide one way or the other what you think their communication response plan should have been as compared to what it was.

[00:14:02] And then later on I went on to the website and I looked up all their videos and some of the links were broken and some of the things were out of date and there were definitely policies that we didn’t know.

[00:14:13] For example, faculty and staff are the first responders of a crisis before anyone else can get there, which is very much in keeping with FEMA, right? Like you’re on your own. And shouldn’t expect support in a crisis because people might not be able to get to you. Right? So I did all this training on this stuff and learned basically, again, it’s almost like neoliberalism pervades even the very fabrics of our society that you are on your own.

[00:14:36] You are the person responsible for a crisis. And so. I think that this is a challenge in a lot of institutions, even institutions that do fairly good onboarding and have fairly good plans, that there are often gaps. At my former institution, the gaps were outstanding. Like, we didn’t even exist in the building as a

[00:14:59] Esther Namubiru: Your center was not mentioned in the building plans?

[00:15:02] Genie Giaimo: It was not, no. We occupied like an old physics lab or something, but no one had been using it. And it ended up being that our emergency plan had too many building coordinators, none of them were answering.

[00:15:16] We weren’t included. It was chaos, a hard word, but when

[00:15:21] Esther Namubiru: you don’t need, if you’re trying to be safe,

[00:15:23] Genie Giaimo: no, and we had an active shooter situation and we were sheltering in place and not to have any guidance. I mean, obviously, though, in the moment of a crisis, who’s going to really look up a building plan anyway, so it’s worth thinking about training and what you should do beforehand, which.

[00:15:41] Admittedly, our plans didn’t prepare us for anything really.

[00:15:45] Esther Namubiru: And you propose that writing center directors don’t just rely on what the institution has created as their plan, but have their own plans as well. Now, how would you respond to someone who says, well, bureaucracy, man.

[00:15:57] If I create my own emergency plan, then I have two plans that I’m using in a moment of crisis. don’t I need some kind of approval to also be able to use my own plan? Am I risking my centers position by having my own adapted plan here. Did you run into those issues when you created your own plan for your center?

[00:16:17] Genie Giaimo: Yeah, good question. I, I also encourage people to work with the different groups, right? Security risk management teams, whoever, you know, crisis response team. There’s typically a number of these at different institutions. I think one of the larger challenges is that Even if you have something like an early alert system, which I talked about the history of that and why most institutions now have that because it’s a part of governmental policy.

[00:16:43] It is possible that the policies that are in place are very general. It is possible that they are out of date, like the one I, I saw and experienced, and a lot of them don’t do post crisis processing And so, I think connecting with the powers that be is important, but I also think that writing centers are a very unique space in the sense that there’s a level of precarity there, right? There’s a lot of people coming in and out of those spaces,

[00:17:11] Esther Namubiru: right, right.

[00:17:13] Genie Giaimo: They might not work from year to year. So, there’s a lot of this changeover that means that institutional policy might not actually account for them. Or reach them. And so this is, to my mind a reason why there should be some sort of internal plan around different kinds of more commonly occurring crises.

[00:17:31] And that’s actually not necessarily an active shooter situation or a pandemic, which is typically on a list but is way down. It’s about, weather events, or a fire, or a gas leak. All of which I have experienced in the Writing Center. Where do you go if there’s a tornado? Does the, do the powers that be have a policy for that?

[00:17:53] And typically they’ll say something like, sign up for the alert system. so I definitely think it’s important to check to see, is there a policy about this in the institution, but also how does it.

[00:18:04] Square against our specific needs in these typically very public, very visible, sometimes glass encased spaces..

[00:18:13] Esther Namubiru: And you also say we should also be revising our risk response plans. What’s the difference between having the emergency plan versus the risk response plan? Do I need both?

[00:18:22] Genie Giaimo: Yeah. So an emergency plan typically there are a couple of versions of them. there’s likely a large campus site 1 and then there’s a smaller 1 by building. And so in the event of an emergency, who are the people in charge?

[00:18:36] Where are the meeting places? If you have to get out of the building quickly, what are the. Preferred egress spaces, The risk management plan is to my mind in some ways more interesting because it is a set of typically actuarial assumptions about what is the most common kind of crisis to occur.

[00:18:59] how likely are we to have certain risks in our spaces and sometimes there’s a little bit about what to do about each of those, right? So Ohio State had a list of 10, and in that 10, there was not a pandemic. I don’t think the active shooter made it on either. I think the top ones were like cyber attack, and weather event and a couple of other things like that.

[00:19:25] And so I try really hard not to catastrophize. This isn’t about frightening people, but understanding what are some of the things that are more likely to occur in the spaces that you occupy.

[00:19:37] And if those things happen, what should you do? a good example of this is when we were under lockdown, a lot of graduate tutors who are international came to campus anyway, because they thought that missing work, Would get them in trouble

[00:19:50] And so they’re coming into campus during basically what was a police action, right? There were police all over their snipers, their helicopters. it was very frightening and they were in open areas because everything got locked.

[00:20:02] so they were hiding in like open lounge areas and texting me. I felt that this is the kind of thing where there needs to be some sort of onboarding like, what are the expectations when an emergency happens? How likely might it be? What have you experienced and what should you do?

[00:20:18] Another time we had a gas leak and all of our tutors evacuated, but a lot of them continued to work at the library because they felt safe and comfortable doing that, right? The gas leak was in a building. About a mile away from the library. And those students felt like they needed to continue their session.

[00:20:35] To me, the risk or emergency crisis verse work continuum is that if anything bad happens, it’s okay not to continue working, but I don’t know that I ever really articulated that to my tutors until I started working on this book a long time ago and started experiencing how dedicated, but also how scary some of their behaviors were not in a deliberate way, but yeah, so a risk management plan is a lot more internal.

[00:21:03] And so really exploring the space that we’re in and what is happening during moments that we, hope don’t happen, but, might.

[00:21:13] Esther Namubiru: And 1 thing that I’m also taking away from what you’ve shared is

[00:21:17] when you have a team that comes from different cultures or identities or roles in the campus, their reaction to what you think is a crisis might be, they may not react the way that you expect them to react.

[00:21:29] Yeah, it’s, it’s cultural, it’s, it’s socioeconomic, it’s racial, it’s gendered, right?

[00:21:36] When things are left at the level of assumption, or they’re kind of low key, a lot of people will be, yeah, afraid to Advocate for themselves, or they might not know that they have the ability or the right to at the same time, there are also different kinds of reactions to stress and trauma that can be dangerous to others.

[00:21:56] Anna Habib: I’m also thinking about, other countries that are in very precarious situations all the time I’m thinking specifically about Lebanon.

[00:22:04] where I’m from. In the past 20 years or, longer, There’s been crisis after crisis after crisis, like war and explosions and in 2020, there was a massive explosion and then the Turkey earthquake that affected Lebanon and Syria and,

[00:22:23] I’m just thinking about how that is their lived experience daily. they’re constantly in that state of hypervigilance. this risk management and emergency planning seems so salient in those contexts,

[00:22:39] there’s a totally different context and there are different things they’re dealing with. But they’re very real and very lived daily.

[00:22:47] Genie Giaimo: Well, in a lot of times when a government gets overthrown, there’s a civil war, the universities closed down because a lot of times they’re bastions of protest.

[00:22:54] so that there is clearly an important place that the university plays in social movements and I also see the sort of desensitization to violence this is a sign of a kind of trauma and processing that trauma is very complex and I know there are mental health care workers who go to disaster areas when they happen, and then they all leave.

[00:23:22] And I know people have critiqued the concept of mutual aid as it might be integrated into higher education because of, all the neoliberal reasons I talk about for everything, but the question of mutual aid is something that might be interesting, and I think it is happening in other spaces, right?

[00:23:39] When the earthquake happened in Turkey, it was the people responding. It was interesting. They were pulling people out of the buildings and that, and the rubble for days and days before anyone got there. And to me, this is a question of collectivity, like when we have crises, how do we respond?

[00:23:56] Anna Habib: Yeah. I was thinking about how students there have experienced disaster so consistently. and culturally it’s a collective experience.

[00:24:07] And so… I’m imagining a writing center or a classroom there, and there’s a crisis, like, everybody there has been sort of, unfortunately conditioned or like, enculturated to know like how to respond, you know? It’s like a natural instinct that everybody now collectively does.

[00:24:28] You know, when we were, for example, out at a restaurant and then we heard this loud explosion, everybody in a second goes under the tables.

[00:24:35] Genie Giaimo: Yeah, I, I hear you. admittedly I was thinking about the unique United States experience because of trauma becoming so much more common natural disasters becoming much more common and active shooting and the children who have grown up now. With exactly that, duck under the desk, be quiet, turn your phones off, don’t make noise.

[00:25:00] And we are now seeing those students come to college, right? So even though you can trace Columbine as like, I think 2000 or so, we now have a whole generation of survivors and of people who didn’t survive from, a mass shooting event and I worry more about, these kinds of large scale emergencies.

[00:25:22] It’s in my background. I was in New York during 9 11. I was in Boston during the Marathon bombing. I’ve experienced lockdowns on multiple campuses, but now we’re starting to have WPAs of that ilk too. Caitlin Clinton’s work, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing her name right, but she actually was also in Ohio state during that time and talks about her experience of VTAC and, and in Nevada with the shooting there.

[00:25:46] I mean, this stuff is happening so often that I just don’t see it going away. it’s going to impact work impact our lives. impact how we process our emotionality.

[00:25:56] And just one other thought When Russia invaded Ukraine, a lot of people left, right?

[00:26:01] Anna Habib: They were setting up schools immediately, the education normalizes a life it helps to keep consistency And this is one of the tragedies I think of what we’re dealing with in the United States, because as gun laws are loosening restrictions, school is coming under attack Okay, on a more, like, hopeful note,

[00:26:22] the chapter on the black liberation movements. I’m wondering if you can speak to how you see those movements as helping us. I’m going to quote your subtitle here, search for wellness in neoliberal educational institutions and beyond.

[00:26:41] Genie Giaimo: Yeah, I’ve been very inspired by modern day iterations of Black feminism in online spaces and urban nature spaces, right? Like Girls Who Walk. when all systems fail you, how then do you move forward? And obviously black and brown people in this country have had every system fail them and have managed to create spaces that were liberatory, that were mutually supportive, that basically reproduce governmental support, but on these small scale level ls.

[00:27:15] Anna Habib: And so I try really hard not to co opt this because I understand the optics of not being a person of color moving into these spaces and identifying, you know for example, like self care is an act of political violence. Resistance, I couldn’t remember it. that quote, by the way, it’s caring for myself is not self indulgence. It is self preservation. And that is an act of political warfare.

[00:27:44] Genie Giaimo: that’s it.

[00:27:44] And I understand that self care looks very different from a commodified commercialized, White lady, middle class valence than it does for like, for example, one of the Black Lives Matter activists who eventually committed suicide. I understand the stakes of this, at the same time, I see small or local level resistances to Neoliberal and extractive industries, governments, as well as alternative community formation as being possibilities for how we move forward.

[00:28:19] And this actually might take place, not in higher education. So I’m just going to give an example two colleagues of mine started their own nonprofit.

[00:28:27] Writing center and this nonprofit writing center not only provides support for a pay scale, but also free support for community members in the local area. I believe it’s in Indianapolis and to and I’ll get the information for you. You all want to promote it. this is an example of this idea of maybe the work that we’re doing in higher education can be put into other spaces that are less extractive, less punishing

[00:28:52] Because a lot of the times the writing center director talk about feeling like they’re the barrier against like the collective forces that are pressing down upon

[00:29:00] Whether it’s the WPA or your writing center director or another group of more precarious workers or also yourself. And so the idea here is that instead of trying to always make our educational academic spaces better, we find alternative ways of doing the work that we love while also having a mission of support and hope.

[00:29:22] The stakes are so high for an individual person navigating such an extractive system to begin with, and then to add on to that being a person of color, being queer or trans, all the platitudes of, retail therapy, right?

[00:29:34] I just like, it’s so, it’s just so outlandish and so callous in a way, but it’s also in keeping with these economic market forces that one can take something that should not only make sense for the individual, but also for A challenge against institutions and make it into another, Amazon Prime Day

[00:29:54] how do you connect self care to what you call the commoditization of feelings?

[00:30:02] So I actually have this really good book to recommend called Why Wellness Sells Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture.

[00:30:10] it’s talking more about how individual people create care regimens and, I like it because it places wellness of all different kinds, pharmaceutical supplements, natural path, whatever, into economic terms.

[00:30:24] so I’m very reluctant to talk about self care, it was very popular for a little bit, I was into it. And then I started looking around saying, well, who’s talking about self care and why, and what does it signal to other people? If you don’t have a steady job, right? What type of self care are you actually going to do?

[00:30:43] If you work three jobs, if you get fired from your institution, is self care really going to make that better? so I have moved away from talking about self care. I only talk about it in relationship to chapter seven, which is to think about who, Ought to be doing self-care.

[00:31:01] and who ought to be doing activism. And it’s not clear cut all the time, but if you have privilege of one kind or another, which most of us might. not all, but most, should we be doing activism? Right. And that could be also tiny acts of political resistance.

[00:31:16] And this is where Lord really comes in, right? When I get pushed to like optimize my writing center, I think about again, what is the effect that that’s going to have on my workers? Right. Especially my most vulnerable workers. And when I think about self care, I think, what can I offer to people to help with self care?

[00:31:33] I think that having conversations about self care is important within the context of writing centers. But it should also be accompanied by, and here’s what we can do to support each other. Here’s what a white tutor can do to support a tutor of color. Here’s what I can do to challenge the sort of common rhetorics of production to support and protect my tutors.

[00:31:56] It’s a lot of work, but it helps to situate the things that we do less within this economic set of optics while also recognizing that every so often people do need to take care of them.

[00:32:09] Weijia Li: Genie, in the opening chapter and I quote Elizabeth Boquet says readers will find in this book, a compelling antidote.

[00:32:19] To the overcoming narratives that underpin most corporatized wellness efforts, end of the quote. So, how is this book overcoming or trying to overcome those narratives?

[00:32:34] Genie Giaimo: I’ll answer that with a story. So when I first started working on this project, it was something like 2017, I had just started a new job at, at Ohio State. I had just left the community college where I was prior to that. And I started, looking around for training models. Ohio State had this great training model with a wellness ambassador who would come in and talk about the, many dimensions of wellness,

[00:32:57] And I thought, this is great. We’re going to have these trainings through our mentorship groups and their student tutors are going to love it. I hope, and it’s something that I can participate in and learn from, but also not create wholesale.

[00:33:10] So we went through three of them, a lot of different kinds of discussion points around change talks. So if I want to enact change in my life, where could I enact that change, right? Along one of these dimensions. It could be spiritual, environmental economic, whatever. And the other part was doing these listening sessions,

[00:33:31] Which were very much like a tutoring session where one person talked, and then the other one listened and prompted, and then the other person talked, etc. Okay, so… I did this for a year and I assessed it and people hated it. but when I went to conferences to talk about how this didn’t work, everyone wanted a handout of those dimensions of wellness.

[00:33:56] And so It sounds so great to say we could just change how we feel about we could get more sleep. We cannot go out in nature. We could be more spiritual, right? At the same time, my tutors are the ones who really pointed out this institution doesn’t care about me.

[00:34:12] They won’t give me good health care. They don’t pay me over the summer. So, why are, why are we doing this work? Right? And then they also talked about the power dynamics of me as a boss, quote unquote, which I am and am not because of my relative power,

[00:34:29] And so where I thought I was creating community, a lot of people were very put off by this. So, so in our field, there’s this pervasive desire to make things right in our center. But the reality is there are so many problems in higher education that we can’t just rely on what they’re providing.

[00:34:48] And then the other side of it is we need to ask, as you all did at the beginning, what are we capable of as administrators? And what can’t we do? so more and more, as I went through this project I’ve started to realize that I’m very suspicious of people who are telling me to do more, especially people in my field.

[00:35:08] I’ve come to a great skepticism of the enthusiasm do it all ness of writing center workers. So that’s kind of the combat, I guess, to neoliberalism or the economic wellness format, because it all is fitting in with the same thing.

[00:35:24] Anna Habib: Let’s constantly improve ourselves. Let’s constantly improve our jobs. Let’s constantly improve our product. And it’s like, sometimes maybe we should be asking, when is enough, do you think a lot of that do-it-allness

[00:35:40] in writing centers comes from our history trying to prove our validity in the institution, trying to be seen like we need to do this, this, this, this, this, this.

[00:35:51] to prove ourselves.

[00:35:52] Esther Namubiru: Like what’s the narrative in our field that feeds into the Overdoing everything and doing a little bit more or a little bit above the rest, even in this area.

[00:36:04] Genie Giaimo: Yeah, I actually had a chapter that never made it into the book about a labor of love. I think it’s complicated. on the one hand, yeah, you can say the history of writing centers is such that we’re kind of always in a one down position.

[00:36:17] Nobody knows what we do as work and so we have to prove ourselves and then also prove ourselves in our field because our work is not maybe all that valued in our professional field either. But as I’ve started to do more research on labor I think one of the challenges in our field is that many of us are in precarious positions.

[00:36:35] We’re not in tenure track positions although we might have been trained by people who are, or who are in very long term stable positions. So we got to be trained at the more functional, let’s say, writing centers with the most stability. you can email me and say, Hey, Genie, I actually, Was at a really crappy writing center that had tons of turnover and I made it anyway.

[00:36:55] Okay, fine. But what I see of the people who publish, who occupied nominally stable positions, they come from like really big, stable, well funded ish writing centers. And then there’s this other group of people who come into this work. And again, this is actually from research I’ve done from other related industries or disciplines.

[00:37:18] And they don’t necessarily stay, and the turnover in our field is very high, there’s in part this constant recreating of the wheel that happens, and I also think there’s this weird boosterism in writing center work where administrators don’t want to say that they’re managers, or they don’t want to say that this is a job and I’m not exactly sure, but I think it’s related to precarity more than lore.

[00:37:43] And again, I haven’t done research on lore, but I have done research on labor and more and more I’m hearing the same story. I got into this because I loved it. I left it because it didn’t love me back. It didn’t treat me well. the institution didn’t treat me right. I couldn’t sustain. And I don’t hear that from a lot of other disciplines in the same way.

[00:38:06] Anna Habib: I had that exact experience at my institution directing the writing center. Yeah. I had to step away from that role because I didn’t feel the love back or the support or the really very basic things that we needed at the time.

[00:38:25] Genie Giaimo: Right. And I appreciate you saying basic because if the basic things that you needed, for example, a stable budget or an assistant director,

[00:38:34] If you don’t get those things, then what eventually people come to see is that their market force is driving our labor. And as much as we do all this work of mentorship support development and emotional labor for our workers, we don’t get that back. that’s part of the beauty of writing centers, but it’s also our downfall.

[00:38:53] Yeah. I don’t know how to square the circle. people can email me out there if they have some ideas.

[00:38:58] Esther Namubiru: as we wrap up this conversation 1 thing that I’m trying to do is to see how all of this would apply to me because I am not a writing center director, but

[00:39:10] I know that there are crises that come up and trying to manage all of those while continuing to work towards the institutional expectations on me, such as, my dissertation work. I just want to know how I would be able to apply an individual level, even though we’ve been talking about from an institutional level

[00:39:32] So I was wondering for you, Genie how have you been able to See the application of the work you’re talking about in your book for yourself given all the roles that you have and projects that you’re managing.

[00:39:44] Genie Giaimo: It’s hard. So I think moving into research on labor, and this most recent project on chronic illness and disability and aging, I learn through my research. I think I come into the work I do now with a healthy dose of skepticism. When people tell me that they want me to do something a certain way or that it was always done this way, I ask, first of all, does it even need to be done?

[00:40:09] And second of all, why does it need to be done in that way? I think about not just efficiencies, but also investment, right? So instead of doing 20 new programs that might, some of which might not be very good or might fail, I do one. When people come to me and ask me to do extra work for committee or service, I try to say no.

[00:40:31] Does that mean that people always listen to me and hear me and accept my no? Sadly, no. we say create boundaries, separate your life from your work try to say no, try to get things off your plate. But there are sometimes people, even good meaning people, Who you would consider colleagues who will not let you do that.

[00:40:49] And it’s at that point that I say, then we need to start interrogating our career choices, right? Should I stay here? And I think that there’s been a lot more movement in the last few years. There’s the great reshuffling. And I think it’s worth considering is this job not only not giving me love back, but giving me the bare things I need to do it.

[00:41:10] And if it’s not, then that’s a worth of interrogation. So it’s an amount of reflection. But also amount or healthy dose of skepticism. I also heed, the advice of one of my graduate advisors who said, okay, you’re in graduate school, get a gym membership and get a therapist. I don’t know that everyone can do that, but I did and it, it kept me in good stead.

[00:41:33] Right? And so. Even if it’s not a gym, going out for a walk, trying to be closer to nature. If it’s not that because of mobility issues, visualizing being in nature, right? Listening to music, just doing something to try to remind yourself, I am a human being separate from my production and my activity in work.

[00:41:51] that’s the challenge of the, current era. How do I function in work, but also develop a self concept that It’s not just about my production and work.

[00:42:02] Thank you. And I love that you’ve said that in addition to being skeptical, you have to develop a self concept that looks at the work you’re doing as not you, but just a part of you, I’m speaking for myself it can get really simple to just distill myself and my identity into PhD.

[00:42:21] And that’s an important project if I’m not careful, I could get. Lost in it, and I forget about all the other things that bring life to me outside of this project.

[00:42:31] Yeah. I appreciate what you’re saying. I also really want to recognize like a lot of people, don’t kind of wake up one day and they’re like, Oh, I’m only my work. Right? not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there are forces that want you to think that way.

[00:42:46] There are people who want you to distill down And your labor and they want they want your work. I think that the larger question around development of self is hard because we go into college and graduate school. We’re quite young. A lot of us.

[00:43:01] We move out. We lose our security systems if we had them to begin with, we move. We’re itinerant. I mean, there’s a lot of things in there. So. So the situation around academia is kind of already unwell. And so how do we create these like fortifications against it? And as many of my colleagues have done, maybe there’s also a possibility of just walking away.

[00:43:21] And I’m not suggesting that that’s an answer for everyone, but I am seeing it more and more in my research. And I think this is where it’s important to think other futures are possible.

[00:43:33] Anna Habib: Yeah. And I think a lot of us, feel like our self worth is tied to our productivity and that is what really needs to be disentangled.

[00:43:41] But what you just said About your new book like really interested me. I think I heard you say it’s about chronic disability and aging

[00:43:53] Genie Giaimo: Yeah. Okay.

[00:43:55] Anna Habib: So we’ll end with this cause and then we’ll interview you for the next book and whatever it is.

[00:44:00] Genie Giaimo: Well, okay. So I’ll, I’ll tell you a little bit and yeah, I would love to talk about this at some point. So I went through a health scare earlier this year and I started thinking, Oh my God, how am I going to work? Right. And I was really curious both what institutions of higher education do to support their workers or not around chronic illness.

[00:44:20] And then the attendant question of aging, You can have chronic illness and not be aging. You could be young with a chronic illness. You can be older. The statistics are more likely that as you age, you will have a chronic illness. And then the question of how do people, do they identify as disabled or not?

[00:44:36] And what I’m finding is that. People who talk about aging mostly don’t identify as having a chronic illness or a disability. And people who talk about chronic illness and disability haven’t really given much thought to aging. There’s Maslow’s hierarchy, right? They’re just trying to get through the day.

[00:44:53] They’re just trying to do their job. And there’s this real reticence to identify as disabled despite potentially then having accommodations that actually help them do their work. And the question of why, of course, is complicated. That will be in the book, but the reason why I’m looking at this is because I’m starting to realize The lack of wellness isn’t just in writing centers it’s in our institutions writ large.

[00:45:16] And so how do people who are academic workers staff faculty, graduate students, adjunct take your take your pick, how do they navigate these spaces? there are questions of longevity in that questions of positionality, but again, and again, I’m seeing the same kind of thing, so many people want to be interviewed because they haven’t been able to talk about this and there’s no space for that.

[00:45:40] And that gives me that pit in my stomach, like I’m onto something, but I’m also afraid because it’s a lot of people’s stories and they’re very vulnerable and I feel a deep amount of commitment to representing what they share ethically and clearly. So, Yep. So that’s a new project.

[00:45:57] Anna Habib: Wow. That’s exciting. And thank you, for doing the work that you do. I personally relate to a lot of what you said, both myself and my lived experience and having three adopted young men who tried to go through college, one of them was able to get through the other two because they felt so misunderstood and unseen.

[00:46:21] So, anyway,

[00:46:22] Genie Giaimo: I have one last thing to say, because I always have to, one of my days at the community college, I was having a really hard day.

[00:46:33] And I was talking to a colleague and I was like, I just don’t know if I’m doing enough, Am I making enough of a difference? And this colleague said to me, all you need is one connection and the likelihood of you retaining in college is going to skyrocket. And for me, that one person was the custodian in my dorm.

[00:46:52] And so I think can I be that one person, but also are there other persons out there who can also share that load? So this is where that balance comes in.

[00:47:04] Anna Habib: Yep. Yeah. Okay. One last thing in this foster care training we went to a long time ago. One of the guest speakers was a neuroscientist and she was talking about how, for a lot of Children and adults with a trauma history especially those who are in very serious depressive episodes

[00:47:25] For example, one healthy relationship can create a new neuropath way that if you cultivate that over time can actually save that person in more ways than one. And that really resonated. that’s what we all can aim to do.

[00:47:40] Genie Giaimo: Yeah.

[00:47:41] Anna Habib: Yeah.

[00:47:42] Esther Namubiru: Thank you so much for joining us, Genie. This has been an enlightening conversation. Listeners, grab a copy of Unwell Writing Center’s Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Education and Beyond.

[00:47:55] And if you can leave us a comment about today’s episode, we’d greatly appreciate it. You can leave the comment on our website where we’re going to post the episode. or you can head over to wherever you get your podcast, Apple podcast, Spotify, and leave a comment there.

[00:48:09] Thank you so much, Anna and Weijia as well.

[00:48:13] Thank you.

[00:48:14] This was great.

[00:48:14] Thanks so much, Genie.