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Christopher DiBiase, Boston College
Christopher DiBiase is a second-year MA student at Boston College. His research interests include writing center theory and practice, the relationship of space and place to composition studies, 19th century American literature, and contemporary political and cultural critique. Current projects include explorations of Deleuze and Guatarri's conception of the rhizome as a model for understanding writing center practice and of the role of (im)potentiality, as understood by Agamben, in peer-tutoring sessions.
Going Public: Exceeding the Center/Margin Binary in Writing Center Studies
Nedra Reynolds, in her essay "Composition's Imagined Geographies: the Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace," explores a number of "imagined geographies," each a prevailing spatial metaphor in the field of composition. Drawing off of the work of post-modern geographers and spatial theorists, she argues that spatial metaphors in composition, when viewed uncritically, obscure the material conditions of composition work. I believe that a critical exploration of the "margin" and "marginality" in writing center discourse will provide an equally productive understanding of how imagined geographies in the writing center are formed and reproduced, as well as how they affect the field (and another metaphor appears) in its relationship with university administration and the material conditions under which writing centers operate.
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