{"id":12625,"date":"2021-12-07T15:39:39","date_gmt":"2021-12-07T20:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dept.writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/?p=12625"},"modified":"2025-02-12T15:55:57","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T21:55:57","slug":"allyship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dept.writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/allyship\/","title":{"rendered":"Allyship & Co-Conspiracy in an Antiracist Writing Center"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

By Gabrielle Isabel Kelenyi and Seth Umbaugh<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

This fall, the Writing Center offered an ongoing education group (OGE) about being an ally versus a co-conspirator in an antiracist writing center, which was co-facilitated by the TA Assistant Director of the Writing Center, Seth Umbaugh, and the TA Coordinator of Multicultural and Social Justice Initiatives, Gabrielle Kelenyi. We assembled a great group of experienced Writing Center instructors to discuss what allyship and co-conspiracy are, how they work in movement-building and community-building contexts, and how these concepts manifest in university and writing center settings. Here, we aim to share with readers a little bit about why this topic is important for ongoing instructor training at our writing center, what happened during our two meetings this semester, and what we learned.<\/p>\n

Why Allyship & Co-Conspiracy?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\"A
(Photo by Bryce Richter \/ UW-Madison)<\/em><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

According to our Inclusivity Statement<\/a>, the Writing Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to \u201c\u200b\u200bprovide a welcoming, egalitarian, and accessible learning environment that is committed to affirming social justice and meeting the diverse needs of the entire UW-Madison community.\u201d The ways that instructors are able to enact our writing center\u2019s commitment to inclusion can sometimes seem limited because we operate in this liminal space between students and their instructors, between writers being assessed and readers with significant evaluative power. On the one hand, we\u2019re trained to help students meet the demands of an assignment, no matter what our personal feelings or professional expertise say about that assignment. On the other hand, Writing Center TAs are graduate students\u2014students who intimately understand the frustrations, confusion, and anxieties of the writers with whom we work. In a writing center that is actively enhancing its antiracist practice at a predominantly white institution that occupies stolen land\u2014 at a university that was built by legacies of settler colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, among other systems of oppression\u2014understanding how we not only connect with students but also support them in ways that can help dismantle those systems is of the utmost importance. Looking at the affordances and challenges of Writing Center TAs\u2019 liminal positionalities through the lens of allyship and co-conspiracy helped our ongoing education group\u00a0 delineate how Writing Center instructors can do active antiracism work in our writing center: how can we be allies to students and instructors around writing, and how can we be co-conspirators with students and instructors around writing, especially when writing is so deeply implicated in inequity?<\/p>\n

\"Pull<\/p>\n

What Happened & What We Learned<\/strong><\/h2>\n

To begin to answer these questions with our small but mighty group of Writing Center instructors, we knew that we needed to define our terms first. Thus, our first meeting\u2019s objective was to define \u201cco-conspirator\u201d and \u201cally.\u201d As preparation, we asked instructors to watch this video of author Dr. Bettina Love<\/a> explaining the differences between co-conspirators and allies and spend 45 minutes looking at two or more of the following pieces:\u00a0<\/p>\n