Our Commitment to Anti-Racism, Equity, and Inclusion

The faculty, staff, and student employees of the Emory Writing Center are committed to combating racism and other forms of oppression while fostering equity and inclusion on campus and beyond. We pursue these commitments through our tutoring, hiring, professional development, programming, and community partnerships.

Words have power: power to oppress, power to resist, power to express, power to inspire. We aim to empower writers of all races, places, socioeconomic classes, gender identities, sexual orientations, religious affiliations, citizenship statuses, abilities, and linguistic backgrounds to grow and share their unique voices while respectfully engaging with their diverse community.

We outline below some of the concrete actions we are taking to advance anti-racism, equity, and inclusion in the Writing Center. We welcome input and invitations to collaborate from Emory students and community members as we pursue this essential work. You can contact us at writingcenter@emory.edu. 

Emory University is located on the land of the Muscogee (Creek) people, and we encourage everyone to learn about the Indigenous past and present of our place and our state. The Emory Writing Center is keenly aware of its positionality, as a program within a university entangled in a history of slavery, colonialism, dispossession, and racism. Atlanta is a city shaped by racial segregation, the civil rights movement, and a continuing struggle for justice. Any institution in this city has to acknowledge this struggle, and in the Emory Writing Center we are conscious of what has happened and is happening nearby, even as the projects and assignments that writers bring to the center represent and foreground issues in other parts of the U.S. and the world. As writing centers engage with challenging topics every day, they can–intentionally or unintentionally so–replicate problematic narratives about land and country, and we consider it our responsibility to encourage our tutors to actively interrogate language and stories that are antithetical to our core mission and values. 

We encourage tutors to educate themselves about diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice issues through our on-campus collaboration with the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and community partnerships with the Autism Center, Freedom University, and the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative. We actively build opportunities within and beyond the Emory Writing Center that join in efforts to raise awareness, address injustice, and support efforts to repair damage that continues to be inflicted on marginalized populations.

We serve the Emory community best when our staff includes students with diverse backgrounds and competencies in a range of languages, dialects, and discourses. During our annual hiring process, we actively recruit applicants from diverse student organizations, including multicultural affinity groups. We also invite all students who have been tutored in the Writing Center to apply for positions as tutors. Our outreach draws a diverse pool of applicants and tutors, and our recruiting process reinforces efforts to recruit and retain staff from traditionally underrepresented and marginalized populations.

We expect every staff member to contribute to our anti-racism, equity, and inclusion mission. In our hiring ads and job descriptions for Writing Center staff, we have added “commitment to anti-racism, equity, and inclusion” to our minimum qualifications. Our preferred qualifications include experiences with multilingualism, supporting language learners, and diversity, equity, and inclusion work. We always discuss these topics with candidates during interviews and prioritize these skills in our hiring processes and decisions. Furthermore, we work to eliminate unintentional biases that may arise during hiring through efforts such as developing and standardizing interview questions together as a community.

Beyond hiring, we support and retain staff through ongoing training and professional development opportunities. These efforts include full team meetings, weekly small group meetings, designing regular check-in surveys, and funding workshops and events featuring scholars working on topics of anti-racism, equity, and inclusion, and more.

• Respecting diverse tutor and writer identities in the Writing Center
• Affirming and supporting writers working in and across multiple languages and varieties of English beyond what is called “standard academic English” 
• Supporting English language learners in ways that acknowledge and draw on their strengths as multilingual authors
• Identifying and intervening as bystanders to confront subtle forms of oppressive language and behavior (e.g. microaggressions, implicit bias, etc.) in favor of what Dr. April Baker-Bell calls linguistic justice
• Using and modeling gender-inclusive language
• Supporting neurodiverse writers
  

In our practicum course for new tutors and in other professional development forums, we will continue our engagement with scholars of color as well as scholars from other marginalized populations. In past years, we have invited scholars including Dr. Wonderful Faison, Dr. Asao B. Inoue, and Dr. April Baker-Bell to meet our tutors, and will continue to invite visiting scholars to share their work on writing and anti-racism. We will continue to support student expression in projects that mesh multiple languages, dialects, and registers. We will also continue to make it easy, via our appointment system, for students to select tutors based on their languages and/or their status as English Language Learning specialists.

We will continue to encourage Emory Office of LGBT Life-facilitated Safe Spaces training for our team, and will continue to collaborate across campus with Emory's affinity spaces.

• Emphasizing our commitment to anti-racism, equity, and inclusion on our public website and social media forums.
• Keeping tutors aware of and empowered by our trigger warning policy, which allows tutors to step back from potentially harmful language and situations.
• Adhering to the inclusive pronouns policies and procedures we developed in 2018 in consultation with the Emory Office of LGBT Life.

• Developing and implementing (during the 2020-2021 academic year; updated 2024) a respect and inclusivity policy for tutors and writers, and sharing this policy on our website and in email reminders.
  

• Arranging our furniture in a way that adheres to and goes beyond legal accessibility requirements in order to accommodate students with a range of abilities and body types.
• Providing physical and online tools that support the needs of students with a range of accessibility needs.

We will continue to promote the Emory Writing Center broadly through our website, social media platforms, fliers, syllabus language, class visits, residence hall programming, and other means in  an attempt to reach all students.

We will continue our support of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), hosting annual research and writing workshops for Fellows.

We will continue co-sponsoring and co-hosting at least one International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) lunch for Emory international students each year.

We will continue to collaborate with Belonging and Community Justice, including  LGBT Life, by facilitating workshops for those groups and being open to other avenues of support.

We will continue and expand collaborations with ISSS, the LGBT Life Office, Accessibility Services, the MMUF program, the English Language Learning Program, language departments, and other Emory offices, departments, and programs that nurture diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In past years, we have co-sponsored events highlighting multilingual writing and celebrating Black writers. We would like to develop more joint programming, publications, and research initiatives with these organizations in the future. We will also seek out new ways to listen to and learn from members of these groups, and we will seek out concrete ways to support the mission and initiatives of these organizations.

In all of our collaborations with student organizations, campus offices, and academic units, we will strive to bring an attitude of openness, humility, and willingness to learn while also offering input and resources of interest and benefit to our collaborators.

The work of the Emory Writing Center is improved iteratively and often through feedback. After each tutorial session, workshop, or event hosted by the Emory Writing Center, we invite participants to share their thoughts through surveys.

We will continue to welcome formal and informal input on our offerings and programmings. We will also continue, via our online appointment system, to collect demographic data regarding race, ethnicity, and language from students willing to disclose it, and we will do targeted outreach to student populations underrepresented in our space.

We will pursue research and projects that amplify and uplift the perspectives of students of color, international students, first-generation and low-income students, and historically underrepresented perspectives, and to take concrete actions in response. The Emory Writing Center community frequently undertakes research projects, which involve focus groups, interviews, surveys, and more, and the leadership will continue to build training and programming based on what we learn.