Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 23, No. 3 (2026)

Editors’ Letter: ‘Which Way to the Writing Center?’ On Affect, Perception, and Place

Mary Fons
The University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

Sam Turner
The University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

There are few challenges writing center professionals have not faced at one time or another: budget cuts, staff turnover, and institutional drama come immediately to mind. Yet, of all the sturm und drang we collectively navigate in order to operate to the best of our ability, the matter of where we do our work is a central—and for many, perpetual—concern. 

It’s no secret that there is as much variety in the respective location arrangements of writing centers as there are writing centers. At the University of Texas at Austin, we are fortunate to have generous space and plenty of natural light in our location on the first floor of Perry-Castañeda Library, one of the few buildings on campus likely utilized by UT’s entire student population at one time or another. But many reading this issue of Praxis will identify more closely with some of the space concerns addressed in this issue. Joel Benabu’s must-read column essay, “‘The “Beehive Effect’: Rethinking Space, Observation and Pedagogy in Writing Centres,” orients this issue. Benabu reminds of the power of place in our work, and the affective potentials of the center ecologies. Next up, Corinna Cape and Uttara Rangarajan offer their column essay (“From Tutoring to Teaching: Course-Embedded Tutoring as Pre-Teaching Pedagogy”) on the relationship between course-embedded tutoring and teacher training, writing “there could be no better place [for transitional pedagogy to develop] than the writing center, where academic support and community come together.”

To be sure, a future issue of Praxis will be dedicated solely to the matter of spatial location; in this issue, scholars apprehend “place” in a variety of ways. In this issue’s first focus article, “Grad Expectations: Student Perceptions of Graduate Writing Centers and the Writer-Consultant Relationship among High-Frequency Users,” David Hershinow and their team from CUNY contribute to conversations about the place of writing centers in graduate education in their report on the folks who visit their space most often. Next up, Torre Puckett and a team of students recall the successes they had in implementing a Student Advisory Board composed of disabled students to advise an ongoing access improvement initiative in their article, “Leadership by the Most Impacted: Accessibility Culture and the Student Advisory Board at the Sweetland Center for Writing.”

Grace Williams and Amy Latawiec contribute to our field’s growing body of work about emotional labor, reporting back about tutors’ relationships to their work following targeted training on emotional labor (“‘I Was Surprised at How Well I Was Able to Handle It’: Performing Emotional Labor with Emotional Intelligence in the Writing Center”). And in “Faculty Perceptions of the Writing Center: Oral Histories from First-Year Composition,” Mekenzie McElroy explores how several first-year composition instructors found their way to the writing center, and how their perceptions of WC work shape how they frame the writing center for their students. 

Kimberly A. Bain brings us back to the physical space of the center in her paper, “Why Place Matters: Identifying Usage Patterns Based on Writing Center Location.” In it, Bain describes a grueling period in which her writing center was forced to operate out of a cramped hallway, and  makes the case for the power of space in “creat[ing] positive associations and memory of writing support on campus.” To round out the issue, tutors under Emily Jane Pucker find ways to wander (slightly) from the beaten path in meeting the needs of multilingual writers (“Tutors’ Flexible Approach in Working with Multilingual Writers”), and David Brauer’s lived experience shows us that the writing center’s place in curricula is forever subject to pedagogical relocation (“Paradigm Shifts: How Institutional Logics Reshape Writing Center Work”).

The end of another spring semester brings hope of a bit of a break, and maybe even the opportunity to see someplace new. We hope you can read this issue from a  space you love, be it a comfy office chair or somewhere far, far away from your institutional duties. We owe our gratitude this spring to the wonderful authors featured in this issue; our dedicated review board who gives so generously of their time; and to our readers, wherever you are.

Mary and Sam