DDGC Writes and Cross-Hierarchical Solidarities

Hannah V. Eldridge (University of Wisconsin–Madison) and Cynthia Shin (Indiana University Bloomington)

In a presentation titled “DDGC Writes and Cross-Hierarchical Solidarities,” which we held during the 2025 DDGC conference, we talked about the collective’s virtual writing support groups and the feelings for which they open up a space. We were inspired by Mimi Khúc’s dear elia (2023), in which she examines what it would look like for academic spaces to accommodate feelings. Khúc asks, “what kinds of feeling are allowed in what kinds of spaces? What is appropriate feeling (and expression of feeling)?” (12). These questions, we felt, were generative prompts to think about the work of the DDGC writing groups.

DDGC runs two sets of writing groups. The asynchronous groups have happened three times a year since 2018. Each is about a semester long. Participants enter weekly goals on the Slack channel at the beginning of the week (whatever that means for you) and check in with updates about how the work went at the end of the week. We encourage each other to use SMART goals for both the entire 15-week cycle and each individual week to make sure that our goals are attainable. At the end of each group, as is the case with our weekly check-ins, we reflect on the long-term goals for the semester. The synchronous groups run similarly, except people actually meet on Zoom to write together “on-site.”

Hannah has been participating in the writing support groups since 2020 and has served as a co-convener of the asynchronous groups since 2023. Cynthia joined in 2022 and remains an eager participant. We both benefited from participating in the writing groups because they provide an excellent infrastructure for the most unstructured yet crucial aspect of academic life. Writing becomes a more concrete task to tackle when you identify its component, manageable parts. By sharing your goals and progress with others, you can learn how to give structure to this task. The groups also offer practical support that sustains writing. People can ask one another about a copy of a text, whether a translation of a text is available, or about the workings of research archives.

However, we believe that the most important part of the writing group is the shared acknowledgment of struggles, and the way our work lives are intertwined with personal, familial, social, and national events, feelings, and catastrophes. It is a space that provides intimacy and care—something that both of us experienced first-hand. Khúc notes that “the time for scholarly work—the time in which it happens, the time in which it is later read and consumed by others—is not usually a time of intimacy or care” (“Making Mental Health” 370). We see the DDGC writing group as an intervention to create an alternative academic space where care is immediately present for the act of writing.

There is no room for feelings in many professional academic spaces. Hannah observes that feelings do not fit into Roberts’ Rules of Order, or other protocols of minutes and motions that preserve meeting hierarchies. Here, rules of our department often dictate that graduate students, pre-tenure colleagues, and non-tenure track colleagues get kicked out of meetings before the most important decisions get made, while colleagues making six figures squabble over 4% or 5% raises with those who do not make a living wage safely out of the room. Even when she wanted to, Hannah hesitated to share her struggles with her graduate students or colleagues more vulnerable than she is because the hierarchies within academic spaces meant that sympathy may feel like the price of advising, a grade, or a letter of recommendation.

The DDGC writing groups opened a different academic space without these forms of hierarchies. There’s a radical leveling within the group, because if we care to share our feelings, they can have space within the group. It was the first place Hannah shared that her identical twin had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and one of the only places she’s openly admitted how much a recent depressive episode derailed her work. Others have shared babies’ births, pet or parent deaths, visa challenges, baking victories, and more. These struggles are not equal, but the baseline assumption within the group is that what is shared matters (even if only by emoji—the most recent group has developed an excellent image idiolect).

Sharing struggles is eye-opening because it allows personal, private life to co-habit academic spaces. When Cynthia first joined the writing group as a graduate student, it was surprising to see that professors have so much work. She saw their obligations to the department, to teaching (often responsible for more courses than graduate students), writing projects, mentoring, leading/planning study abroad, serving on committees, etc. She used to imagine academic writing as something that is done in a closed office space, away from everything. Now she sees Germanists who also do the dishes and walk their dogs and go to the hospital and have hobbies. This realization helps her see herself as an academic, too, even when she’s thinking about writing this blog post while vacuuming cat hair.

What everyone in the writing group had in common was that we continued writing, fully acknowledging the life happening around us. It was easier to write in challenging circumstances when you had a space to share what life is like for you alongside setting sanctioned professional writing goals. People who show up to the group week after week provide a stability that makes you believe “we are in this together.”

Our reflections here are only our own experiences. We do not want to claim we have somehow figured everything out or that everyone experiences the writing space as we did. However, we hope that our testimony can be an invitation for you to join DDGC writing groups and to consider what other non-hierarchical structures we can create together.

Works Cited

Khúc, Mimi. Dear Elia. Duke UP, 2023.

---. “Making Mental Health through Open in Emergency: A Journey in Love Letters.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 120, no. 2, 2021, pp. 369–88.