Abstract
Keeping the invention of the university and the identity struggle of the first-year university students in mind, this chapter argues that the Writing Center is ideally suited to being a safe house. Through an analysis of more than 900 client reports written during the 2015–2016 academic year, the chapter complicates our understanding of the affective labor happening in the Writing Center and outlines some strategies for understanding and undertaking the work of supporting students in their process of invention. It suggests that it is in the affective labor that we may find the importance of the Writing Center at the Global University.
Most of the information in this article pertaining to the mission of the NYUAD Writing Center and its policies was initially written in collaboration with Dr. Marion Wrenn, director of the NYU Abu Dhabi Writing Program, and Luise Beaumont, writing center manager at NYU Abu Dhabi. None of this could have been written without them. I am grateful to be their colleague.
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This number does not account for the full number of writing consultations performed by writing instructors at NYUAD. Writing instructors are embedded into the First-Year-Writing Seminar, where they perform mandatory tutorials with students. These large numbers of consultations are unaccounted for in the writing center statistics, though it is clear from my experience that the affective labor performed in these ongoing relationships between students and writing instructors is just as significant an element as it is in the writing center if not, in fact, greater.
References
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Nielsen, K. (2018). There May Have Been Other Stuff Going On: Affective Labor and the Writing Center as a Safe House. In: Barnawi, O. (eds) Writing Centers in the Higher Education Landscape of the Arabian Gulf. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55366-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55366-5_8
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