At the Event Horizon: Possibilities and Precarities in WAC/WID’s Reckoning with Antiracism

Abstract

As a field, WAC/WID has been called to engage antiracist work as part of the broader reckoning with race in writing studies. However, it is not clear to what extent WAC/WID practitioners have actually taken up these calls. Historically, WAC/WID has failed to engage with race and racial equity, with Anson (2012) calling a lack of attention to these issues a “black hole” in WAC. Today, I argue, WAC stands at the ‘event horizon’ of this black hole, drawn in by the need to engage racial equity work. My study utilizes modified grounded theory analysis of a survey and interviews of 45 WAC practitioners at a range of US higher education institutions to identify how on-the-ground practice has responded to the need for antiracist work. I demonstrate that participants are taking significant steps to engage racial equity in their programs—though not always explicitly—in ways that are reshaping the field of WAC. Their work is shaped by their conceptions of antiracism, which reflect the complexity of conversations in the field around antiracist practice, and by their programmatic and institutional contexts.I conclude that often-binary definitions of antiracism do not fully capture the nuances of that work, proposing instead that we describe in what ways any given program is taking up antiracism. And I describe a range of strategies participants used to take up this work to offer practical strategies to WAC practitioners.