Liberation Literacies: Reflexivity, Instructional Practices, and Healing with Writing

Abstract

Writing centers are commonly described as student-focused literacy spaces where writers can receive support at any stage of the composing process through dialogue, feedback, and collaborative meaning-making. Yet, writing centers are not neutral sites of literacy. Within predominantly white institutional contexts, they remain shaped by racialized language ideologies, standardized English norms, professor expectations, and deficit framings of multilingual writers and Writers of Color. As a result, writing support can become entangled with correction, compliance, and linguistic assimilation rather than dignity, agency, and meaningful participation. This three-paper dissertation examines what it means to write, and to support writing, toward liberation and healing within institutional spaces where language has long functioned as a mechanism of power. Across the dissertation, I use Liberation Literacies (Lyiscott, 2018) as a conceptual framework for understanding literacy not as a neutral academic skill, but as a social, historical, embodied, and relational practice through which people make meaning, negotiate identity, and participate in community. In this framework, liberation is understood as an ongoing struggle against oppressive language ideologies and institutional harms while cultivating conditions for agency, dignity, and collective well-being. In study 1, “Liberation literacies and pedagogies of witnessing: a collaborative autoethnography of education scholars as they (re)humanize ‘the missing people,’” I theorize what writing toward liberation can mean for Palestinian education scholars living through an ongoing wound. Using critical collaborative autoethnography, counterstory, and multimodal literacy mapping, this study positions Liberation Literacies and pedagogies of witnessing as a conceptual ground for the dissertation and argues that writing can serve as a humanizing location for engaging in truth-telling as an ongoing process of becoming. In study 2, “Palestinian Pedagogies in the Writing Center: Writing Toward Liberation and Healing,” I move this framework into the writing center by examining how liberation and healing take shape in tutoring praxis over time within a predominantly white institutional context. Drawing on practitioner action research and reflexive journaling collected across an academic year, this study traces iterative cycles of rupture, reflection, and action as I examine how my tutor identity, linguistic justice commitments, and institutional expectations shape what becomes possible in tutoring sessions. The findings show that harm reduction, solidarity, and the refusal of deficit framings can become ethical orientations for tutoring, while also revealing how institutional norms continue to press writing support toward gatekeeping and standardization. In study 3, “An Arts-Based Exploration of Writing Center Tutors’ Liberatory Place-Making,” I extend this inquiry from individual reflection to collective place-making through an arts-based narrative study with graduate writing center tutors at predominantly white institutions in the mid-Atlantic region. Through two workshops, six tutors produced narratives of constrained tutoring moments, rewrote them as if liberation had been possible, and created multimodal identity wheels to make sense of their own identities and possibilities for action within writing center work. This study examines the concept of the absent audience to describe how institutional power enters writing center sessions through professor expectations, standardized genre conventions, time limits, and ideologies of standardized English, even when institutional agents are not physically present. Findings show that liberatory praxis becomes visible through concrete justice moves such as validation, reframing, naming power, and confidence repair, but also that such work requires administrative protections, structural support, and collective accountability. This dissertation argues that liberation and healing are mutually constitutive in literacy practice and that writing can function as a method of witnessing and repair. These studies contribute to writing center discourse and literacy education by theorizing liberation as praxis, tracing how it emerges in everyday literacy practice, and demonstrating that justice-oriented writing work depends not only on individual commitments, but also on the institutional conditions that make such work sustainable. Ultimately, writing centers can become sites of possibility when they recognize writers’ epistemic authority and cultivate the material conditions necessary to sustain justice-oriented praxis.