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In 2012, we set out to document the everyday lives of nine new writing center directors through a collaborative, longitudinal case study. We recognized that while the field is saturated with anecdotal accounts and lots of nuts-and-bolts discus- sion, we have few empirical studies and even fewer longitudinal empirical studies of writing center administration, despite ongoing calls for precisely this kind of research (Babcock; Boquet and Lerner). The closest is Writing Centers in Context (Kinkead and Harris), a case study of twelve writing centers-not directors-pub- lished over twenty years ago. To date, the picture of writing center administrative work remains blurry. Writing center administration continues to be misunderstood and undervalued, and very few new directors believe they are well-prepared for the actual work of running a writing center.
We wanted a different view. Where Writing Centers in Context asks "What do writing centers in particular contexts look like?" we ask a more inclusive set of questions about writing center labor: "Who is doing the work of directing writing centers?" "What work do new writing center directors perform?" These questions demand attention to the specifics of writing center labor within particular contexts that shape, enable, and constrain labor. This article offers a first glimpse into our findings that new writing center directors engage in multiple kinds of labor, from the disciplinary and everyday to the emotional, and that the nature of this work complicates received notions of writing centers, writing center administration, and writing center work in general.
We solicited participants for this study through personal contacts and a formal call for participants on WCENTER and SSWC-L. Eighteen new directors agreed to participate. From those, we selected nine participants in their first or second year of writing center administration who possessed a range of different credentials and po- sitions in an equally diverse range of institutional settings. Our sample includes two tenure-track directors, one high school director, one public charter school director, one international (secondary) boarding school director, one historically black col- lege/university director, one online, for-profit institution director, one community college director, one non-tenure-track private college director, and one non-faculty administrative public university director. We conducted monthly (as possible) semi-structured interviews with our participants via Skype, phone, or email over the course of an academic...