2 Radical Care at the Centre: A Kitchen Table Autoethnography

Simon Fraser University

We see each other’s videos come up on screen and giggle, a little nervously.“Hi, thanks for being willing to meet like this. The world is… strange right now.”

“Yeah, I am really glad we were still able to connect. Plus, it’s cool being able to see your kitchen behind you. I like those cabinets.” 

“Thanks. My partner and I built this house. I’ve thought about going into interior design, but I am trying out this degree for now …”

So began my (Julia’s) first virtual consultation. I was struck by how an off-handed compliment provided such a window into the student’s life and her considerable skills and accomplishments beyond the classroom, the degree she was “trying out,” and the writing we would go on to discuss. Of course, this potential for connection always exists in consultations. But, there was something specifically intimate about this moment, as I not only learned a fact about the student, but was simultaneously welcomed into her kitchen, even while I physically remained in my office at the university.^[1] This student’s comment that she was “trying out” the degree is also relevant to the way we seek to situate the writing centre/learning commons as a “kitchen table” space in the academy: kitchen tables can be messy spaces in our homes precisely because they are multifaceted in their functionality. Kitchen tables are spaces where we can both prepare and eat meals. They are also spaces where homework is completed, bills are paid, and paperwork and home projects pile up. They are spaces where we gather and “try things out.”

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, writing centre tutors and students engaged with one another from their homes and from a variety of other spaces outside the academic institution. Writing centre literature frequently connects carework and the desire for our physical spaces to be cozy and homelike. Indeed, Jackie Grutsch McKinney notes that it is “striking” that “the design of so many writing centers, despite differences in location, size, mission, population served, staff, and so forth, is governed by this metaphor of home” (7).

In this paper, we ask what the possibilities are when writing centres no longer require us to operate through a metaphor of home, and instead create opportunities for us to slip out of the institution and into one another’s homes.

One of the possibilities that arises is that we replace a generic “home space,” with specific, grounded experiences that individuals have with their actual homes and feeling of what it means to be “at home”^[2]

In this chapter, we move away from the couches, photos, and coffee pots that so often serve to construct the writing centre as a welcoming space within larger “impersonal institutional spaces” (Grutsch McKinney 7); we gather instead around the writing centre as kitchen table space, focusing on how writing consultation discussions can invite us to be incomplete and in-process together in ways that nurture radical care.

Around the Kitchen Table   

Kitchens, and more specifically kitchen tables, are recognized as uniquely meaningful sites in Black radical tradition (McCutcheon & Kohl; Lyiscott et al.; McNeill et al.). Indigenous research methodologies (Johnson), and grassroots activist organizing. In their kitchen table talk, artists Cathy Mattes (Michif) and Sherry Farrell Racette (Algonquin/Metis/Irish) explain that the kitchen table is “where some of the best learning occurs. When we gather […] around food and tea, we relax into easy conversation, lending to a safe space for dialogue and knowledge sharing” (n.p.). Jay T. Johnson (Delaware and Cherokee) further explains that “kitchen table discourse” as an Indigenous research methodology describes the transition from “more formal” to “more relaxed” in both physical space and communication style:

Jamila Lyiscott elaborates on the kind of sharing, learning, and knowing that is made possible through kitchen-table work:

We include this full quotation so as not to erase Lyiscott’s focus on kitchen tables in the African Diaspora in their specificity. At the same time, we acknowledge that many writing centres across Turtle Island (also known as North America) are predominately white spaces that do not make space for the kinship, oral tradition, and “insider communication” for Black and Indigenous students that Lyiscott and Johnson have described. Embracing practices of radical care asks us to engage with the space between current writing centre practices and the possibility that writing centres could become expansive kitchen table spaces that welcome more people to gather as insiders or even as kin.

In their 2015 article, “Kitchen Table Reflexivity,” Ellen Kohl and Priscella McCutcheon connect kitchen table work with “everyday talk,” explaining that both offer “an escape from the stress of the research process, a space far removed from the academic environment” (749). They draw on Karen Tracy’s work to define “everyday talk” as “the ordinary kinds of communicating people do in schools, workplaces, shops, and at public meetings, as well as when they are at home or with their friends” (7). This focus on everyday talk is especially meaningful in the writing centre context, as, we suggest, writing consultations can be the best opportunities students have to participate in “everyday” conversations about ideas, assignments, and essays that often require them (or are perceived as requiring them) to use language in the “non-everyday” scholarly tenor. In this way, the writing centre has the potential to function as a kitchen table space, removed from the stress of the academic environment, even while still being embedded in that very environment. The more writing consultations can embrace everyday talk, informality, commitment to remain in-process, and radical care leaning toward kindred engagement, the more fully we are able to create such a kitchen table space. The COVID-19 pandemic opened consideration of this possibility by physically removing our consultations from the academic environment. But we maintain that kitchen table spaces are more about an approach and an ethos of engagement than they are about physical space, while simultaneously acknowledging that removing ourselves from the stress of the academic environment when we are physically in that same environment is a more challenging feat.

Setting the Table for Radical Care

One of the co-authors of this paper, Kate, speaks about the experience of growing up in a house that had both a dining room table and a kitchen table. The dining room table, she shares, was where you had to “behave properly.” The kitchen table, by comparison, was less formal: a place where you could share in the messiness of life together. Using this metaphor, we can think about classrooms and lectures as akin to the dining room table: places where students are assessed and judged and therefore must use language and writing “properly” – they must be, or at least perform, “completeness.” This completeness is inherently exclusionary, ableist (see Jay Dolmage’s Academic Ableism for a thorough unpacking), and, within the structures of western academic institutions, deeply bound up with white supremacy (see the characteristics of white supremacy culture, developed from the initial work of Tema Okun). Writing centres, however, have the potential to be kitchen table spaces: places where students can be messy in their thinking, speaking, and writing and share in the messiness of their ideas and writing-in-process together.

It is, perhaps, this opportunity to engage in both “everyday” and vulnerable conversations about academic content–rather than the details of decor–that most significantly mark the writing centre as a space apart within the institution and opens the door to the possibility of radical care.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a time of heightened uncertainty and vulnerability and the mere fact that we continued to connect in writing consultations during this time opened the door to more intimate “everyday” talk. Connecting radical care with social movements, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese draw on Angela Davis’s writing to argue that there is a “growing awareness that individual impulses and interior lives, the intimate and banal details of family histories and personal experiences, are directly connected to external forces” (1). During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, students connected with us virtually, outside of the institutional space and often from our homes. Connecting in these ways heightened the possibility for engaging with the “intimate and banal details” of our lives, as we continued the vulnerable task of writing in the context of pandemic. In the rest of this chapter, we offer vignettes from our consultation experiences to consider the intimacies of kitchen table engagement, to question who feels welcome at the writing centre table, to examine the multidirectionality of radical care, and to illuminate the gift of kitchen table care in writing centres.

Collaborative Autoethnography 

Our writing has unfolded as we have collectively experienced the twists and turns of the global COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic has necessitated many pivots and re-imaginings, and has thrown into stark relief the “care deficits” (McGee) that mark our socio-cultural landscape. We therefore focus our discussion here on the possibilities and challenges for care throughout the virtual turn many writing centres experienced during the pandemic.

We offer our individual and shared experiences through collaborative autoethnography. Autoethnography is sometimes described as insider ethnography, or studies conducted by researchers who are already part of the community they write about. Arthur Bochner and Carolyn Ellis’ conception of evocative autoethnography extends this understanding by describing it as research that offers a “critical response to disquieting concerns about silent authorship, the need for  researcher  reflexivity,  or  as  a  humanizing,  moral,  aesthetic,  emotion-centered, political, and personal form of representation” (47). We add “collaborative” to autoethnography here because, while this paper includes narratives written from each of our first-person perspectives, the broader ideas and analysis stem from our conversations and collective writing.

The autoethnographic approach allowed us to think with and about our experiences together (Phillips et al.), mirroring Hobart and Kneese’s understanding of radical care as feeling with, rather than feeling for, another (2). This process has pushed us to think and feel not only with one another as co-authors, but also with our own recalled writing centre experiences prior to, during, and beyond the virtual turn. We offer session reflections here as illustrative, “evocative stories” (Bochner and Ellis) of our shared work of engaging radical caring. We have not erased or flattened the differences in our experiences and perspectives precisely because, as Khadija Aziz writes, radical care requires us “to recognize that what works for one person may not work for another” (21). And so, in this writing and in our work, we engage the messiness that is writing centre care.

Julia: Intimate and Banal Details 

My name is Julia. I am a Writing Services Coordinator at a Student Learning Commons. I have been the direct supervisor for the three other co-authors. I hold a doctorate in Arts Education and I am relatively early in my writing centre career. I am a white settler living on unceded Coast Salish lands and I self-identify as a cis-femme mother and writer.

The dialogue that opens this piece comes from my first virtual consultation, held the day after our university announced that it was “canceling all on-campus classes and activities in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19.”  At that point, I did not know that my kitchen island would soon become my virtual office, just as I was unaware of the many forms of slippage I would experience as my identities of mother to a young child and writing centre professional settled into the same time and space, often my kitchen (See Fig. 3).

In March 2020, my son had not yet started kindergarten, so when both his daycare and the physical space of the Student Learning Commons closed, my world became very centred around my kitchen island space. Very often, I had meetings and writing consultations from this space while finishing up my breakfast or lunch that would sit to the left of my laptop (see fig. 4), supporting an activity for my son to the right of my laptop (see fig. 6), and monitoring some kind of cooking or baking project (behind my laptop on the other side of the kitchen island (see fig. 5).

Many narratives have been shared about the complexities of work-from-home life and, in particular, the gendered ways those complexities played out (for example, see Alyssa Lukpat’s New York Times article “These Mothers Were Exhausted, So They Met on a Field to Scream” or watch a short video from Vancouvermom.ca, “I Learn as a Mother”). Even more has been written about how, despite its challenges, working from home was actually a pandemic luxury, as those deemed essential workers, including many racialized women in low paying jobs, were required to continue reporting to work, despite the risks they experienced (see, for example, Janet Jones’ “‘Do the right thing’: Framing COVID-19 stay-at-home orders as moral choice stigmatizes workers,” Megan Tobias Neely’s “Essential and Expendable: Gendered Labor in the Coronavirus Crisis” and  Catherine Powell’s “The Color and Gender of COVID: Essential Workers, Not Disposable People”). In my writing centre work, what was intriguing was that my sense of many things (sometimes what felt like too many things) happening in the same time and space often contributed to, rather than distracted from, my discussions with colleagues and students: we used cooking and baking as extended analogies for the processes of research and writing; we connected over the stories my child would chime in from off-screen, remembering the joys of wild imagination; and we bonded over shared experiences of the chaos of daily life. In short, we came to know each other more intimately because our virtual connection exposed us to the banal details of one another’s lives. While many lamented the loss of human connection as we interacted through screens, I experienced the exact opposite, as those I connected with from my laptop screen perched on my kitchen island came to know me in a much more human, in-process, and kindred way than they ever had in the Student Learning Commons space.

Mohsen: Who Feels Welcome at the Writing Centre Table?

My name is Mohsen. I am an immigrant to Canada from Iran. English is not my first language; I started learning English at the age of twenty. Before that, I only knew a few words and grammar rules. I did my bachelor’s and master’s in English language teaching in Iran before coming to Canada in 2012 to do a second master’s in Education. I am currently a PhD student at Simon Fraser University, in the Faculty of Education. I have been working as a Graduate Writing Facilitator for almost four years.

As a Non-Native Speaker/Writer of English, I sometimes feel illegitimate working at a predominantly white institution. I find myself in precarious positions mainly because I teach something (Academic Writing in English) that belongs to white people. This sense of precarity is entrenched when my clients are English native speakers, or when I am teaching a workshop in a class where the instructor and most students are white native speakers of English. In a physical space where I am surrounded by other people, there is always the question of legitimacy. I’m not suggesting that others think I am not a legitimate writing advisor; this is a feeling I, as an English as an Additional Language (EAL) writer/speaker, have: What do students think about a person who doesn’t speak/write English as their first language but is now helping people, some of whom speak it as their first (or only) language?

Even some EAL students might expect their writing advisors to be Native Speakers/Writers of English (See Canagarajah for a more in-depth discussion of this point). They might not expect to see a non-white, EAL writing advisor at the table. Therefore, doing in-person consultations/workshops heightens the feeling of illegitimacy and the sense of precarity that I have within the institution. My race, skin colour, accent, and even nationality all play a role in how I am viewed by others in the physical space (here my understanding is informed by Canagarajah’s “Multilingual Identity in Teaching Multilingual Writing”).

Similarly, students who are learning across language, cultural, and racial barriers feel their precarity in the institution as a daily experience and may therefore feel the need to “escape” from the academic environment more acutely than other students. Racialized students often find themselves in stressful and precarious positions in the institution because they may not be native speakers/writers of English (or it may be assumed they are not, even when they are), and they may not (prefer to) write in the Standardized Academic (white) English that universities demand. These students, too, might carry with them feelings of illegitimacy and inauthenticity (Kramsch). Students attending Canadian universities are expected to be highly proficient in very specific English language skills and competent in academic writing. Thus, because English language proficiency is connected with being perceived as a legitimate student, EAL students in an English-dominated academic environment might feel illegitimate and precarious because of their (assumed lack of) language proficiency.

Hobart and Kneese’s definition of radical care as a “set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds” (1) is especially intriguing for me in considering how writing centres can practice radical care for EAL students. As a commonsense survival strategy, instructors often send EAL students to visit the writing centre to “fix their writing.” However, rather than feeling welcomed and invited to engage with us around the kitchen table of ideas, these students can end up feeling that their connection with the writing centre entrenches their precarity or makes their illegitimacy as writers and thinkers all the more visible. When visiting us on-campus, students are taken to an open space where they may be surrounded by white, native English speakers. Being observed may make these already-precarious students hyper-aware that others “doubt the legitimacy of their admission,” as with Alexandria Lockett’s description of her resistance to visiting the writing centre. Although we try to provide support, the instructor and university’s expectations do not allow us to enact radical care; we are expected to fix students’ writing and therefore required to treat them like they are lacking. Rather than being a strategy for survival, a visit to the writing centre can entrench students’ precarity.

While not a perfect solution, writing consultations in a virtual space create opportunities for escaping the precarious world of the university, thereby opening new possibilities for radical care. I have noticed that more EAL students visit me virtually to avoid the challenges of the university environment. Students have more choice about where they join a virtual consultation from, and they often talk more freely about why they visited the tutor, perhaps because they aren’t being observed and therefore don’t risk being labeled as students “in need” or “at risk.” This freer, everyday talk can arise because the students are in a more private and comfortable space (mostly their homes) and feel more at ease to discuss their challenges.

This sense that EAL students experience the stress of research and writing in the academic environment in unique and heightened ways is shared by other Student Learning Commons colleagues. Recently, I have been involved with an assessment project considering the effectiveness of our hybrid consultation model, offering students the choice of in-person or virtual consultations. As a part of this project, I spoke with students and Writing and Learning Peer Educators about their experiences with both modalities of consultation. In response to the question “Who do you think virtual consultations work best for?”, one of the Peer Educators said:

EAL students may feel more comfortable in virtual consultations, feeling less conscious about their language proficiency because they aren’t surrounded by people who speak English as their first language. Students can even turn their videos entirely off, allowing them to connect without having to be seen. Students may use this option to decentralize parts of themselves that might make them self-conscious or that they worry might be negatively judged by others.

EAL students’ comfort to engage in everyday talk in these consultations may also be explained because English isn’t my first language, so they might feel more comfortable talking to someone who shares with them not having that privilege (of speaking English as a first language). Being able to choose which consultant they meet with and the modality of the consultation can support students to engage in everyday talk in their writing consultations. It also helps them avoid feeling that they have to maintain the English-language vigilance they perform elsewhere at the university. This degree of choice therefore opens new possibilities for who feels welcome at the writing centre table. This degree of choice therefore opens new possibilities for who feels welcome at the writing centre table. When the writing centre aims to operate with a kitchen table ethos, it is our goal to set the table for many — actively making adjustments all the time, as we learn more about who feels welcome and who we have unwittingly turned away. These adjustments ultimately position the writing centre as a better place to learn and share strategies for surviving the precarious world of academia — something that we have always aimed for but have sometimes been structurally unable to accomplish, perhaps especially for those who experience the precarity of our academic world most acutely. Since we do not expect writing centres to be a one-time visit or a “one size fits all” place, providing students the opportunity to choose their consultant and the mode of delivery can empower them and increase their  sense of ownership over their writing process. It can also encourage them to continue visiting us. And by visiting us more, students learn that writing is a process rather than a product that needs to be completed in one session. They will feel welcome to bring us their questions and concerns throughout the semester rather than a few days before their submission deadline.

Universities are stressful places that make us (students, tutors, and even professional staff) feel precarious because they expect us to consistently meet certain standards which we typically do not have the opportunity to shape. This performance of competence can be even more challenging for EAL students, tutors, and staff, as universities expect us to be proficient in English, too. The writing centre and specific writing consultants can make space for students to be at the kitchen table together: to gather in a more comfortable, supportive, empowering, and inclusive space. In taking up this ethos, the writing centre has the opportunity to empower marginalized groups like EAL students by respecting and uplifting their agency and autonomy. In practical terms, this respect is demonstrated by recognizing the diversity of students’ voices, experiences, and preferences and by providing them with as much flexibility and choice about their consultations (modality, consultant, etc.) as possible. These steps foster a more welcoming and inclusive environment so students feel more comfortable visiting the writing centre and being in process in their language, their writing, their sense of confidence, and in the development of their identities as writers and thinkers. A kitchen table writing consultation is one in which we can acknowledge feelings of illegitimacy, name the structures of the institution that produce these feelings, and co-create opportunities to speak, think, and write anyway.

Mackenzie: Radical Care as Multi-Directional

My name is Mackenzie. I first began my writing centre work as a Writing and Learning Peer Educator – a volunteer position primarily held by undergraduate students–-but my term was cut short due to the onset of the pandemic. I was hired as Graduate Writing Facilitator in September 2021, as the university returned to in-person instruction and activities. I am a white, cis-male settler, and I am the youngest author in this paper–what some might term a digital native. Yet, I’m less fond of virtual options than my co-authors. In fact, throughout the virtual turn, I have maintained an affinity for in-person work over virtual. This sentiment has been echoed by students I have worked with at our writing centre, some of whom have disclosed through anonymous surveys that they prefer in-person consultations because it is “easier for [them] to understand things and explain [their] needs in a face to face setting” as in-person methods are “more personal” and provide the means for “easier communication [and] shar[ing]”.

I don’t believe, however, that it is necessary to pit virtual against in-person methods. Rather, the practice of radical care in writing centre work necessitates flexibility and a high degree of choice for tutors, students, and staff–-remembering, as Aziz writes, that “what works for one person may not work for another” (21). After all, the provision of care necessitates accessibility of the care being provided. While writing centre work is often governed by policies aimed to ensure clarity and consistency of service, an approach grounded in radical care requires taking:

the time to learn, empathize and support ourselves and our communities to overcome challenges or obstacles. To care is to show up for the receiver of care, as well as ourselves … Radical care helps us think differently about our big problems and what we can do about them. (Aziz 21)

While the focus of this chapter was initially on how the virtual turn necessitated by the onset of the pandemic changed our writing centre work, my own approach and ongoing preference for on campus work helped us to think differently about how virtual connection seems to support radical care in the writing centre. Rather than it being the technology itself, we recognized that it is the orientation to listening and adjusting, rather than consistently applying best practices, that fosters care.

Aziz’s reminder that radical care is multi-directional and not self-sacrificial is important. Writing centre tutors and staff are often understood to be a service for students seeking support. But one thing that the pandemic demonstrated clearly is that service people (including frontline and essential workers) are people before they can provide any service. In my own work, while I continue to provide virtual consultations with students where that is their preference, ignoring my own yearning for in-person connection does not allow me to care more or better. Indeed, denying or downplaying what makes consultations meaningful for me is more likely to lead to burnout than to any form of care. Writing centre tutors and professionals often get into our work because we care about both students and writing. Such a care-based motivation can make our work especially meaningful; however, as McGee explains, “the meaningfulness of any particular employment” is not static or even necessarily stable and can, in fact, “evaporate suddenly in the face of the recognition of inexcusable injustice and inequality (the untenable working conditions of contingent labour) or with the emergence of new care responsibilities” (58). The conditions of the pandemic certainly both revealed pre-existing injustice and inequality and put new pressures on our care responsibilities within writing centres. While writing centre professionals are expected to care as a part of our jobs, an approach founded in radical care and kitchen table praxis reminds us that we are only able to meet this demand when we, ourselves, are cared for-–when we find meaning in our work and support in our workplaces.

The primary aspect of virtual consultations I find limiting is that, to me, they carry an innately impersonal element. In my experience, because we are no longer in a shared physical space, virtual consultations can create barriers to organic connection, causing the tutor and student to feel removed from one another. This distancing makes it more difficult for me to put myself in the students’ shoes. This is a barrier to practicing radical care because, as Hobart and Kneese define it, radical care means “feeling with, rather than feeling for, others” (2). In the virtual space, I often find myself feeling for students but can struggle to feel with them. By this I mean that instead of fostering and engaging in an intimate, collaborative process in which I experience a great deal of empathy for the individuals with whom I work, I have found that virtual methods promote a more sympathetic stance, in which I understand the students’ concerns, but do not feel them myself. Furthermore, the virtual consultation software we use presents the students’ assignments front and center, while only providing a small window in the top corner for video conferencing. As a result, students and tutors alike are attending centrally to the piece of writing, rather than to each other. The focus of these consultations is the product itself, not the individuals involved. In the virtual space, I often find myself feeling for students but can struggle to feel with them. While this approach has some benefits, such as those described by Mohsen above, this set up often results, for me, in a primary focus on “academic” results, dampening the shared feeling and acknowledgment of “non-academic” concerns that I have often experienced during in-person consultations.

Although virtual consultations provide greater accessibility for those who don’t have the time, resources, or ability to travel to campus, relying on virtual methods alone is as exclusive as relying solely on in-person consultations. What about those members of our community who don’t have secure and stable internet connections? And what about those who simply aren’t tech-savvy? In addition to the practical and accessibility challenges that attend virtual consultations, many students simply value the physical space of the writing centre as a place to focus on academic work. Take the following excerpt from a student at our writing centre as an example:

My experiences and those of the students we heard from above demonstrate that the provision of continued and collaborative radical care requires us to structure our writing centre work with as much flexibility of choice as possible. The kitchen table ethos challenges writing centres to remain “in process” by staying open and responsive to the needs of students, tutors, and staff, rather than becoming static in our approaches. In this way, writing centres have the opportunity to integrate empathy into an academic context that is comparatively sterile and typically devoid of such personal elements. In line with our discussion of kitchen tables above, this requires us to show up at the table ourselves, honestly and vulnerably, rather than try to present ourselves as neutral performers of a function or service. In doing so, we can better offer students a space in which they can participate in intimate shared experiences, while also exercising writers’ power to shape the social and physical environment in which they interact to ensure they are working in a place of personal preference and comfort.

Kate: Everyday Offerings of Home

My name is Kate. As a Graduate Writing Facilitator since 2018, I assisted the writing centre’s virtual shift when the pandemic began. I am a white settler completing Ph.D. research that uses virtual spaces for collaborative storytelling.

In my former career as a public high school teacher, I was fortunate to work in a school that was trying out Polycom and Skype so our classes could videoconference with climate scientists, activists, and school groups from across the continent. In 2010, my students and I began experimenting with how to be in physical and virtual spaces at the same time—all of us crowded together in our classroom, transported through a virtual portal into another classroom of students who, like us, sat clumped together peering from another time zone. In 2012, a school in a neighbouring province asked if we’d like to try weekly virtual debates after school. We spent excited hours rearranging furniture, repositioning cameras—curating the spaces on either side of our video screens—until students felt they might actually be making eye contact. As we moved into each other’s worlds, exchanging words and sounds, it was sometimes hard to tell who was hosting whom. Everyday offerings flowed between our spaces—peals of laughter, a late-afternoon sunbeam. When we waved good-bye and the portal closed between us, those offerings remained, and we were altered by this experience.

So the modal shift of the pandemic shouldn’t have been new for me: the virtual was already familiar. But this time I felt something else within my virtual rectangle. I felt a sense of freedom to be myself. In my virtual experiences at the high school, I’d always been in a space with other people, other bodies. But in the new virtual space of a writing facilitation, I was alone in my own physical space, no longer distracted by other bodies or conscious of my own. I was, quite literally, at home.

Mackenzie’s reminder that as writing facilitators we need to show up to the table “honestly and vulnerably” resonates with me, as does the assertion that writing centres must offer multiple ways to access support for our writing process, and that this is a form of care. Options allow us to select the mode that makes us most comfortable—or least uncomfortable. I am my best kitchen-table person—relaxed, focused, open, listening—in virtual spaces. I perceive these as intimate, as “in-person.” Here I am most capable of providing radical care. Students who still choose to meet in virtual space do so because, for whatever reason, it works best for them, too. This was the case of the student I describe below who joined me from her family’s kitchen table in a home on the other side of the world. Despite being very far from campus, care for her writing was accessible precisely because we, as a writing centre, cared enough to offer a virtual option.

They are so noisy,” she apologizes. The student tells me she lives at the edge of a tropical forest. It is 4am in her time zone, and birds in the forest are waking up. Their voices fill the space between us. I am suddenly aware of the gift of someone else’s life — and ecosystem — leaking into my home space.

What do we call this phenomenon of rehumanizing a space by bringing into it multisensory offerings? Even with cameras off, the sensory slips through, inviting us beyond the boundaries of our walls: “Radical care is not always a grand, in-your-face action,” Aziz tells us. “It also includes the little things that can lift us up, such as creating a sense of community and relaxation on the same online meeting platforms that were designed for office work” (22). How do I compare the virtual portal with the industrial learning space of the writing centre with its unremarkable flooring, uniform tables, and chairs whose plastic form is shaped to cup an average body, but not an everybody? Within the neutralized space of the physical writing centre, we asked students to revise sensory passages, while the windows beside us remained closed, buffering the sounds and sensations beyond. The pandemic required us to throw open those windows to connect our sensory worlds.

Within virtual spaces, our worlds are temporarily conjoined—domestic spaces where meals are being prepared, and spaces where multiple types of care are enacted. In the virtual turn, I found myself in “home” spaces surrounded by the sounds that accompanied others’ learning every day—in  spaces like those where I first learned to shape ideas with language: in a kitchen, at a table, with early morning light dancing at the edge of the curtains, and the song of early-morning birds.

Kitchen Table Caring at the Centre 

In the Radical Caring issue of Shameless magazine, Aziz writes “Radical care means finding solutions using the resources currently available to solve big problems” (20). In March 2020, our writing centre had a big problem: our campus was locked down and our consultations had always been tied to our physical locations. We quickly realized, however, that the consultations themselves were not reliant on being on campus and, what’s more, that we had access to several different types of technology that allowed us to connect virtually with students, including through the scheduling software we were already using. This was actually slightly embarrassing for us, since we had been trying to figure out ways to better connect the three, geographically distanced campuses of the university for years. Turns out there were solutions available to us all along, we simply needed to find and apply them to solve our big problems in meaningful ways.

Returning once more to Aziz:

We are not convinced that there will ever be such a thing as “over” when it comes to pandemics. Yet, we join with Aziz’s rallying call that we have an opportunity to continue to grow and intentionally engage with the possibilities that have emerged for writing centre work over the past three years, actively pulling more chairs around our kitchen table as we learn to survive and thrive together.

Through the virtual turn, we physically slipped out of the institutional space, and conceptually slipped out of our habituated understandings of the writing centre and our roles within it. In these moments, the writing centre was less a space than an “affective connective tissue” (Hobart and Kneese 1-2) of humans engaging in the shared work of kitchen table caring–caring with one another about the high stakes work of learning and writing in precarious times. Practicing transformative listening–listening well and deeply (Garcia)–to our own experiences during that virtual turn allows us to deepen our commitment to radical care as a writing centre practice. It challenges us to continually re-imagine writing centre spaces and engagements as opportunities to remain in-process with one another; to embrace informal and “everyday” communication as antidotes to the high-stakes performances and perfectionisms of the institution; to value kinship connection and even, where possible, establish intimacies and kinship with one another through attending to the banal details of our lives. In sum, to commit ourselves to one another’s survival in the precarious world of academia.

Works Cited

Aziz, Khadija. “Radical Care in Digital Spaces: Caring for our Communities through a Pandemic.” Shameless, vol. 44, fall 2021, pp. 20-23, https://shamelessmag.com/issue/fall-2021.

Bochner, Arthur, and Carolyn Ellis. Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories. Routledge, 2016.

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