Precariously Centered: The Experiences of Contingent Women Writing Center Administrators - Hardcover

by Liliana M. Naydan (Author)

Precariously Centered confronts the troubling intersection of gender and contingency in administrative writing center work-an intersection that has haunted writing centers for decades. Featuring findings from a groundbreaking qualitative study of a diverse group of contingent women writing center administrators, Liliana M. Naydan, Maggie M. Herb, and Clint Gardner demonstrate that gender and its intersections have personal, professional, disciplinary, and pedagogical consequences in writing centers.

This report on interview-based qualitative research documents the experiences of sixteen writing center administrators-how their working lives are often complicated by the intersection of gender, contingency, and other identities. The authors address precarity, identity-based discrimination, extensive and invisible emotional labor, limited resources, lack of institutional support, and barriers to promotion. The words of these administrators come into conversation with scholarship on identity, feminist theory, and the current labor crisis in higher education and reveal challenges ranging from a dearth of resources to discrimination. Their words also reveal dire disciplinary and pedagogical consequences for our institutions and higher education.

Amid increasingly distressing labor conditions in the early twenty-first century, Precariously Centered addresses how writing center professionals-and all academics-can better address contingency, the corporatization of higher education, and the patriarchy. It emphasizes the value of discourse about working conditions, intersectional solidarity, and organizing for labor justice.

Author Biography

Liliana M. Naydan is professor of English and writing program coordinator at Penn State Abington. She researches writing center labor as well as twenty-first-century US literature. She is the author of Genre Migrations, Flat-World Fiction, and Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction and coeditor of Out in the Center and Terror in Global Narrative. She serves on the editorial board for Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty.

Maggie M. Herb is associate professor of English and director of the Muriel A. Howard Honors Program at SUNY Buffalo State University, where she served as director of the Writing Center from 2016 to 2024. She is vice president of the International Writing Centers Association and codirector of the Western New York Writing Project.

Clint Gardner is director of Student Writing and Reading Centers at Salt Lake Community College in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has served in various leadership roles in the writing center and two-year college communities over the past thirty-six years.