We're so excited to be hosting the SCWCA conference this weekend here in Austin, which is guaranteed to start a whole lot of exciting conversations. We'd like to keep those conversations going online at Axis. Send us an e-mail (praxisuwc@gmail.com) if you're interested in writing short post-conference reflections, reactions, questions, or ideas.
See you all today!
Read MoreToday in the academy we are writing lesson plans and finalizing syllabi, writing e-mails to students and finishing novels and bracing ourselves for the start of the spring semester, which at UT Austin begins tomorrow.
Today in the United States, we honor the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, and we think seriously about their legacy. In what ways is the current moment a continuation of slavery and colonialism, of civil war and civil rights? In what ways have we broken with that history, and to what ends
Read MoreThis week, as the national conversation about systemic racial violence continues, we think about what it means for our institution and for our work.
At his 2005 keynote address at the IWCA/NCPTW conference, Victor Villanueva earned a standing ovation for his call for increased attention to race in the writing center. Within weeks, as Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan report in Writing Centers and the New Racism, the conversation was reduced to silence.
Racism, write Greenfield and Rowan, is shaped by silence. As Villanueva remarked, "if we no longer speak of 'racism,' racism gets ignored." There are many appropriate responses to the events in Ferguson and Staten Island, but silence, we think, is not one of them.
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