When teachers with antiracist goals invite students to share in assessment practices, they open up possibilities to reflect on their own and their students’ politics and subjectivities. The contributors to Narratives of Joy and Failure in Antiracist Assessment share their reflections on their efforts to engage in this collaboration. The chapters in this edited collection consider three central questions: How might writing teachers and students account for their own intersectional embodied subjectivities in collaborative writing assessment practices? What roles do the politics of judgement play in assessment ecologies where students collaborate with the teacher? Broadly speaking, how might writing teachers and students with antiracist goals navigate the complexities and tensions that arise through collaborative writing assessment practices?

Asao B. Inoue is professor of rhetoric and composition in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. Among his many articles and chapters on writing assessment, race, and racism, his article “Theorizing Failure in U.S. Writing Assessments” in Research in the Teaching of En­glish won the 2014 CWPA Outstanding Scholarship Award. His co-edited collection, Race and Writing Assessment (2012) won the 2014 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for an edited collection. And his book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future (2015) won the 2017 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for a monograph and the 2015 CWPA Outstanding Book Award.

Kristin DeMint Bailey, now an independent scholar, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, specializing in antiracist writing pedagogies and assessment. Her dissertation explores how students’ and teachers’ languaging in a Black culture center at a predominantly White institution cultivates Black students’ academic identities, creates community, and leads institutional antiracism in a historically hostile environment. Throughout the dissertation, she problematizes her own White subjectivity.