Radical Transparency brings together candid, powerful accounts of what it means to live, work, and labor as a graduate student in writing studies in today’s academy. At a moment when higher education is defined by precarity, burnout, widening inequities, and political uncertainty, this collection names, without sanitizing, the emotional, embodied, and institutional realities that shape graduate education.

Blending scholarly analysis with personal narrative, the chapters document graduate student experiences across writing studies, rhetoric and composition, and related fields. Contributors take up issues often rendered invisible in official program materials and institutional discourse, including disability and access, queer and crip temporalities, financial and labor precarity, mentoring breakdowns, emotional labor, care work, grief, and the hidden curricula that govern graduate life. Together, these chapters reveal how graduate students navigate systems that demand resilience while frequently withholding transparency, support, and care. Organized around three intersecting threads—navigating precarity, building networks of care, and reimagining academic work—Radical Transparency also introduces an emotional-labor tagging system that allows readers to trace recurring forms of labor and affective demand as they surface in different institutional contexts.

Whether read cover to cover or approached nonlinearly, the text invites readers to see connections accumulate—and patterns emerge. Radical Transparency is for graduate students who suspect they’re not broken. It is for faculty and administrators willing to sit with discomfort, accountability, and complicity. And it is for anyone who believes that transparency without action is insufficient and that telling the truth, collectively and aloud, is a form of resistance.

Justin H. Cook is assistant professor of English and director of the Writing Center at High Point University. He is the editor-in-chief of the undergraduate journal Innovation: Journal of Creative and Scholarly Work and serves on the editorial board of Catalyst: Interdisciplinary Journal of Service-Learning and Community Engagement. His scholarship appears in journals and edited collections focused on AI-assisted writing pedagogy, accessibility, writing program administration, and technical and professional writing.

Skye Roberson is an instructor of English at High Point University. Roberson’s scholarship on writing centers, feminist rhetorical strategies, and collaborative learning has appeared in Xchanges and several edited collections.