Listening Across: A Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Understanding Power Dynamics within a University Writing Center

Abstract

In this multivocal piece, we take a cultural rhetorics approach foregrounding story and lived experience as we investigate the internal power structures of our writing center. We share positionality stories from our different institutional and social identities to practice there-ness and constellate our stories to create what we call a listening across framework. Through listening across our stories, we sometimes find common ground and sometimes find ruptures that we cannot mend. We see listening across as a decolonial practice that interrogates and disrupts practices that reinforce colonial structures and ways of knowing.