Speaker Series

The Writing Center at Michigan State University’s 2023 virtual speaker series brought together conversations about Tier II writing and writers, writing across the curriculum (WAC) and writing in the disciplines (WID) work, this series addressed both pragmatic and human responses to these two questions: What does it mean to be a writer in the academy? And what support do teachers (or tutors) of writing need to empower their students? At the core of writing pedagogy is the practice of centering the writer – the centering of process over simplified product. This series seeks to think through and critically analyze how WAC/WID programming can better engage and support writers themselves – not just their writing – through considering intersections of identities ranging from personal to professional.

This series featured WAC/WID scholars, colleagues who lead WAC/WID initiatives at our fellow Big 10 Institutions, and researchers who study the relationship between writing and anti-ableism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism. By thinking both broadly – in terms of globalism, multilingualism, and intersectionality – and specifically – in terms of programming, structure, resources, and support – we fostered a robust conversation about the ways in which personhood deeply affects both writers and their writing. As people across the world grapple with their experience of the pandemic, their hopes for their future, and the ways they contextualize or describe their experience of their “places” – whether academic, internal, or literal – we see powerful connections between identity and story. We bring our whole selves to our work, and we bring our whole selves to the page. This series explored those connections as they play out in classrooms and in writers themselves.

Videos of these talks are available on our YouTube channel.

The Writing Center @ MSU in partnership with the East Central Writing Center Association (ECWCA), presented our 3rd speaker series “Storytelling as Activism.”

Storytelling, a shared act between tellers and listeners, has the potential to shape not just what we think, but how we think and make meaning together. As Andrea Riley-Mukavetz says, “story is theory” (110).

Stories aren’t just a way to exchange information but a way to inform cultures, change individual and collective actions, create community, and transform public opinion. Stories are a way of knowing. Stories are also a way into feeling and experiencing alongside others, leading us into a knowledge that is personal, living, and engaged.

This speaker series ended with the keynote speaker for this year’s ECWCA conference “Critically Imagining Writing Centers: Stories, Counterstories, and Futures,” hosted by the Writing Center @ MSU in celebration of our 30th year.

With talks from Dr. Lamar Johnson, Dr. Travis Webster, Dr. Andrea Riley Mukavetz, and ending with Dr. Aja Martinez’s keynote address at the East Central Writing Center Association conference.

Videos of these talks are available on our YouTube channel.

Our commitment to access and accessibility led to the creation of our Accessibility Statement and the theme of our 2nd annual speaker series “Writing Centers and Access.”

This series included talks and workshops from Drs. Jay Dolmage, Margaret Price, Julie Minich, Stephanie Kerschbaum, and Christina Cedillo.

Captioned recordings of these talks and workshops are available on our YouTube channel.

Our Language Statement is designed to advocate and accommodate the linguistic diversity of our students. Growing out of strong collaborations between our local writing center and the MSU community, our statement hopes to make visible long-standing research-advocacy traditions around linguistic justice in multiple fields.

In rolling out the Language Statement in the academic year of 2019-2020, The Writing Center @ MSU is committed to fostering and sustaining a community, both in our writing center and the larger academic community at MSU, with an adept understanding of the social and ideological dimensions of languaging and language use.

As such, our center’s focus during this year was facilitating an invited speaker series around language diversity for the larger MSU teaching community. By both fostering dialogues around language and power with the larger community and reflecting on our center’s practices, we challenge our campus community to a sustained and on-going commitment to equity and inclusion in our academic communities.