Vol. 8 No. 2 (Summer 2026)

Dr. Sara Humphreys is an associate teaching professor at the University of Victoria. Her primary area of interest lies within the fields of Rhetorical Genre Studies, Media and Game Studies, Composition, Rhetoric, and  Canadian Writing Studies, particularly in terms of how genres can function to accommodate, affect, oppress, and even liberate different audiences and negotiate multiple traditions of communication in varied social contexts. At the undergraduate and graduate levels, she teaches with the aim to open doors for students who might otherwise face barriers to reaching their academic goals. She encourages students to see composition and rhetoric(s) from the perspective of their own communities, narratives, knowledges, and histories.

In 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the eponymous main character ends up in a ragtag postapocalyptic community, Bartertown, where the main entertainment and resolution of political in-fighting is the Thunderdome. The leader of Bartertown, Auntie Entity (played by the late and incomparable Tina Turner), ziplines into the Thunderdome from above to pronounce a winner as the crowd chants “two men enter, one-man leaves.” Gendered language aside, postsecondary education in late 2020s Canada bears an uncanny resemblance to the Thunderdome where administrators “zipline” into the frontlines and judge as departments, libraries, and learning commons fight for scant resources. Arguably (or perhaps not-so-arguably), this scenario is even more brutal for writing centre specialists: They are professionally marginalized at every turn.

That’s a bleak analogy, but considering that many aspects of postsecondary education in Canada are undergoing existential threats, perhaps we haven’t gone far enough? But there is hope. Coalitions are a key ingredient to gaining institutional agency, empowerment, and yes, even job security (although this one often takes a frustrating combination of persistence and downright luck).

The other key is gaining access to academic freedom. Writing centres are centres of teaching and learning; therefore, those who work in writing centres require the very same protections via academic freedom and intellectual property rights university instructors receive (we recognize college instructors often have no academic freedom and work contract to contract).

These are conclusions drawn from our SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant (KSG) funded project Writing & Power. We are sure no one is surprised to learn that writing centres, learning commons, and writing programs (within and outside of English departments) struggle within ridiculously asymmetrical power relations that pervade postsecondary bureaucracies. But we also heard a great deal about developing and ongoing coalitions that work to ameliorate these hegemonic asymmetries.

How do we know? Our project sought to gather primary data from dozens of talented and dedicated writing centre staff, support staff, writing instructors, and writing program administrators. Again, we weren’t surprised that writing centres are undervalued and under-resourced, but we were blown away by their dedication and persistence in the face of consistent marginalization by administrators and faculty. Yet is persistence helping anyone gain ground? When is it time to move from persistence to resistance? We have no answers, but perhaps what our participants revealed can provide a starting point for you to consider your local context. If you are resisting (and many are), how can you do so safely?

There were four main areas that participants and interviewees returned to time and again:

• Tension between postsecondary agendas and policies versus what’s needed for actual change.
• Use of precarity to control writing centre staff (e.g., enforce restrictive labour practices, control behaviour, limit discourse).
• The dedication of writing centre professionals to empower students, particularly students from marginalized and colonized student populations, despite resistance from (some) faculty, struggles with precarity, and an utter lack of resources (and, often, lack of respect from administrators in the form of job security, proper funding, and access to technology).
• The impressive ways in which writing centre managers and professionals have found ways to counter academic hegemonies that threaten the crucial work writing centres perform.

Postsecondary Hegemony or the Thunderdome

Postsecondary strategic and academic plans change every three to five years, and wherever the winds blow, writing centre professionals must follow. Often designated as “staff,” writing centre professionals are really not “staff” in the classic sense. Writing centre professionals teach and perform scholarship (period), and we quickly realized that writing centre specialists are trapped in a type of linguistic prison or placeholder that hails their work into existence within university hegemonies as “less than” the work of faculty.

That is, “staff” is a placeholder for a certain type of employee in the postsecondary hegemony who does not have academic agency, much less academic freedom. Anyone who performs evidence-based teaching doesn’t just deserve academic freedom, they require it.

Just for a brief refresher, David Robinson, former Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT)—which is the umbrella organization for university teachers across Canada—defines academic freedom as

[F]reedom to teach, to engage in classroom discussion, choose your pedagogical approach and your materials and how you assess students. There’s the freedom to research and pursue knowledge where you think there will be new discoveries without any outside interference. There’s the freedom to engage in service to the institution which also means the ability to criticize the institution. And finally, the freedom to engage in what’s often called extramural academic freedom; public commentary, or to speak as a professor in the public realm.

Writing centre specialists (at the very least) need control over their pedagogical materials, yet as staff, their materials can be (and have been) vetted and reviewed to make sure they align with institutional values. Writing centre “staff” are governed by Human Resources policies and employment expectations that have almost nothing to do with the actual work writing centre professionals do—namely, a kind of instruction that is rigorous, responsive, and highly varied. Writing centre professionals are hamstrung by their common employment designation: staff.

As you probably noticed, we are shifting terminology to make a point: writing centre professionals are not staff. They engage with pedagogies from across the campus, and their work is also informed by writing centre-specific pedagogy. They are university-level instructors (indeed, many of them actually work simultaneously as sessionals) and need all the rights and privileges bestowed on faculty, especially academic freedom, to do their jobs effectively.

By saying that writing centre professors (we are now playing with different terms for this kind of work) require academic freedom, we mean that the participants and interviewees told us they cannot do their jobs effectively in their current employment genre. Genres are not easily budged. Like durable genres, they have a life of their own in complex systems, such as postsecondary education. Incremental, steady change is possible when enough voices come together to further a common purpose.

Change is happening, thanks to coalition building and inclusive community empowerment. Over at Wilfrid Laurier, for example, writing services director Christin Wright-Taylor and learning consultant Elizabeth Clarke are doing what they can to empower students and educate WLU professors through their centre’s Translingual Writing Bank: an online repository of linguistically diverse scholarly prose that pushes back against Standard Academic English (SAE). The bank provides models for students who want to experiment with translingual writing without pushback from faculty who are not ready and willing to accept linguistic equity.

A fantastic example of both student empowerment and coalition building is Wright-Taylor’s and Clarke’s email template that students can use to negotiate linguistic equity and justice with their professors—an addition they deemed necessary because, as Wright-Taylor pointed out in the interview, they’re in “an interesting spot”: “a weird rhetorical situation.” These efforts build coalitions with students who may view the writing centre as a space for remedial writing but find that they are invited to collaborate in a safe space where their cultures, histories and narratives are respected. Writing centre teaching professionals (another term shift) do not usually have a say in the curriculum and they typically have strict student-facing mandates, which means they cannot communicate directly with faculty about the needs of their students. Teaching students how to advocate for linguistic justice benefits faculty, students and the institution.

But the writing specialists (there’s another change in terminology) who work at these centres have a crucial perspective that faculty and admin would be wise to recognize and leverage. Writing centres see students from virtually every faculty and discipline. They are witness to a range of effective (and not–so-effective) assignments and pedagogies from across the institution. They have what amounts to a ground-level and panoramic view of the student body and, as such, can speak to general trends (e.g., what are students saying about GenAI?) as well as contextualize the specific struggles of the students who visit them. They are an incomparable resource to both students and faculty—and yet, they struggle to be seen and heard within an institutional structure that frequently downplays their expertise.

Precarity is a feature, not a bug

So why is this—why are writing centre professionals consistently overlooked? Well, for one thing, the level of sustained advocacy necessary for systemic change is difficult to achieve when your community is perennially splintered. Our project found that institutional precarity creates a “revolving door” effect in many writing centres and learning commons. Under-resourced and under-valued, writing centres are frequently staffed with folks who, out of necessity, have “other work going on”: they might be teaching, writing a thesis or dissertation, or, as Julia Lane observed in her interview “actually be in the hustle looking for other jobs.” For these reasons and more, writing centres experience high turnover rates and suffer the cumulative effects of a protracted precarity. What Lane so aptly deemed a “slow leak effect” brought on by such instability can be devastating to morale:

We/people in those positions, I don’t think can invest much of themselves into positions that are temporary because we’re always on shifting ground, and so we don’t feel the investment back to us, and thus it is vulnerable on an emotional and practical level to actually invest ourselves back into that role.

When staff leave to find stable, secure workplaces elsewhere or are pushed out because their contracts have ended, those left behind lose treasured friends and crucial support in the form of historical knowledge of the institution and the Centre. But as always, those who suffer the most are students who do not benefit from the nuance and richness of insights gleaned over time, forged in a stable community of practice.

Empowering Students

Despite these structural challenges, our participants and interviewees shared an array of experiences empowering students in their writing centre and support roles. What we learned on this front, though, is what you already know: writing centre work needs better job security, more protections, and improved overall working conditions. Just because the following experiences provide a snapshot of support excellence across the country does not mean the status quo is working. Rather, here’s what writing centre and support professionals are achieving, but what more could they do if given additional support?

Students as catalysts for change

The following insights are from writing centre professionals who requested to remain anonymous to protect their positions. [Redacted] sees students as catalysts for change: what if students are empowered to make small changes themselves, because these “small changes can encourage larger changes” (Appendix A). As a member of their institution’s writing centre, [redacted] tries to enact more change through student engagement because, as they explain,

While we are aligned with the institution, we don’t wait for change. And yet even saying something like that is dangerous because staff can’t push back. As well, students [and staff] can get into power imbalances with instructors, who want only APA citation or materials that have gone through Western publishing systems but not considered other knowledge sources, such as Indigenous ways of knowing. At the writing centre, we have conversations with students about bringing Traditional Knowledge (TK) into their work and how that can happen while meeting the instructor’s expectations. We give students the tools to have these kinds of discussions.

The above is an act of what is best called harm reduction; many of our interviewees decide that the best way to support students is bypass bureaucratic quicksand. As [redacted] pointed out, one of the issues in making change at the institutional level is the glacial pace of institutional change. Everything is hierarchical and has to trickle down: a policy is changed, then units enact the policy and staff and faculty put it in place. [Redacted] explains that postsecondary institutions really need to consider the emotional labour and toll in asking students and staff to take up this kind of work. The institution may “talk about diversity and inclusion” but there is a difference between “welcoming someone in and giving them a place to sit.” Brian Hotson, (former Writing Centre Specialist), explains, “The way to affect change is through students. The last thing the administration wants is bad press.” (The first part of this section has been excerpted from the report: Writing & Power).

To harken back to our rather clumsy Thunderdome analogy, there is no empowerment when we as professionals (instructors and writing centre professionals) are overburdened with ridiculous workloads; underfunded to the extent that we can’t keep up with rapid technological changes (hybrid human-AI writing, anyone?); and demoralized by faculty who order writing centre professionals to do their bidding (because writing support is “service”). Many are refusing to even enter the Thunderdome and are working instead to teach students self-advocacy and build coalitions with willing faculty, yet they do this work at great personal peril. They risk annoying administrators who demand compliance to party lines and may not renew the contracts of “problem staff.”

Coalition Building as Resistance

Writing support teaching professionals need more agency and additional protections when they are asked to tackle complex matters such as citational justice, linguistic equity, and anti-racist writing pedagogies. Without access to job security and academic freedom to push back, support staff can neither fully advocate for students nor suggest necessary changes when they see, for example, racist assignments. The following is also drawn from our project report and, again, even university leaders were fearful of identifying themselves. [Redacted], a university leader, explained that while a public controversy may be “unpleasant” for a stably employed faculty member, that same controversy may be devastating for a precarious faculty or staff member. Activism, according to [redacted], takes up resources and requires leaders to defend faculty who take positions on issues. But this type of defence is not available to writing support staff, who are, in point of fact, performing a type of teaching.

A possible solution is for writing centre professionals to join Faculty Associations where their teaching and research can be better understood and protected. Of course, a move like this takes even more coalition-building, but there is precedent at York University and Simon Fraser University. If writing centre specialists had access to the same types of protections and tenure that librarians enjoy, they could be more effective in empowering marginalized students and making suggestions to faculty about course and assignment design in terms of writing. Building on this point, Katja Thieme, Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, emphasizes that academic freedom is a privilege that is “not evenly distributed.”

Let’s return to where we started. Beyond the Thunderdome ends with a coalition of ragtag survivors comprising factions and characters Max encounters over the course of the film. Instead of focusing on Mad Max and his heroic feats, the coalition is what matters here. Despite their differences, this coalition ends up creating a thriving community that welcomes other survivors. We may not be working in a postapocalyptic landscape (yet), but these types of stories are really about how we imagine our future. Coalitions can be built in hallways, over coffee, or in committees: our research shows they work. Much like in Mad Max, coalitions don’t have to like each other; they just need a common goal.

Image credit: Photo by Sebastian Leonhardt on Unsplash