Review: ( E ) merging Identities: Graduate Students in the Writing Center

Abstract

The scholarship of (E)Merging Identities: Graduate Students in the Writing Center sheds light on a little-discussed contact zone in composition theory, a place where the identities of graduate students merge with those of teachers, tutors, coordinators, liaisons, and administrators. Such mergers disrupt the conventional conception of graduate students as pre-professionals and cause disruptions in the institutional hierarchy. Nevertheless, as Melissa Nicolas asserts in the introduction to (E)Merging Identities, “graduate students are most definitely students, people who are learning about and becoming initiated into a field or discipline” (1). In this sense, graduate students who pursue writing center work, particularly administrative work, are attempting to shift their identities from neophytes to experts; the very fact that they are in graduate school indicates that they hope someday to be recognized as professionals (with tenure!).