This year’s Southeastern Writing Center Association (SWCA), a US-based affiliate of the International Writing Center Association, was hosted by Emory University in Decatur, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. The SWCA and other regional affiliates offer opportunities for US writing center professionals to share their work and learn from others in their region, though attendees and presenters are not required to work in the region. The conference focused on movements. Drawing on Atlanta’s long history of participation in the civil rights movement, much of the conference focused social justice and its relationship to writing center work. Panel topics varied widely, covering topics such as generative AI, student connections to campus, linguistic justice, and the emotional labor of writing center work.

The plenary talk, delivered by Dr. Laura Emiko Soltis and several of her students (who need to remain anonymous due to their immigration status), covered Freedom University, an underground institution founded to serve undocumented high school students to help them find places to attend college. Because of Georgia’s regressive policies that prevent undocumented immigrants from getting in-state tuition at public schools in the state. The school’s philosophy is built on the work of Paulo Freire and others in critical pedagogy circles. A huge percentage of Georgia’s undocumented students are people of color (less than ten percent are white), so these students are navigating a series of complicated legal and systemic injustices as they attempt to attend college. The program is enormously successful; since 2018, half of the students have received full scholarships to college, and in 2023 all students received full scholarships. Freedom University works directly with the Emory University Writing Center and the Agnes Scott College Writing Center, and Dr. Soltis points directly to their work as one reason for the recent success.

Dr. Elise Dixon and Morgan Zacheus of the University of North Carolina-Pembroke gave a deeply moving talk on the relationship between writing center work and the complicated race relations in eastern North Carolina. Dixon set up the conversation by outlining the well-known concepts of code-switching and code-meshing. They then introduced the term “value meshing” to describe the way the Zacheus’s work in the writing center asks her to navigate her own relationship to race and racial justice. Zacheus is Lumbee, an indigenous people who founded the university before it was part of the UNC system, but Lumbee English tends to be discouraged in academic settings at the school. Zacheus shared a deeply moving account of her connections to her own culture and the emotional labor required to mesh the expectations of the cultures at home and at school.

Of course, generative AI was an important topic of conversation, and there were several panels that focused on how AI can be harnessed for use in writing centers. The consensus, it seemed to me, was that there were some ways for it to be useful, such as brainstorming, support for second-language learners, research and citation assistance, and revision guidance, but much of the group remained relatively skeptical of it. That said, reactionary responses (including my own) seem to be tempering somewhat as we learn more about the technology.

Another presentation, from Liping Yang, considered digital activism and its relationship to writing pedagogy. Yang focused on the hashtag #stopasianhate that appeared in the aftermath of the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. She offered an history of racism towards Asians in North America, beginning with the first major wave in the nineteenth century, which she traced all the way to the Trump administration and the hate speech it practiced and encouraged. She then went on to discuss the impacts of this digital activism on writing pedagogy. She was particularly interested updated the definition of information literacy to encompass digital activism; students need to learn to recognize activism, hate speech, and the ways hashtags are sometimes weaponized against justice.

I found the conference stimulating, and I was thrilled with the remarkable range of material covered. I have attended SWCA eleven times now—I felt my age suddenly when I realized that on the plane—and it is a real highlight of my semester every time I’m able to attend.

About the Author

Graham Stowe is an assistant professor of English, Director of the Writing Center, and Director of First-Year Writing at Canisius University in Buffalo, New York. His research focuses on critical pedagogy and its relationship to writing center pedagogy. He teaches first-year writing, writing center pedagogy courses and advanced composition. He lives in Amherst, New York with his family and a dog named Spatula.