Engaging Museums
About This Book
Engaging Museums looks at how museums can reshape rhetorical education through their handling of hard, uncomfortable histories. These institutions ask visitors to face traumatic events and work toward a better future. Museum studies and rhetoric both put the audience at the center of their scholarship and practice. This volume works across and between the two fields to build a fuller theory of how rhetorical education connects to social justice, and how that connection plays out in practice. It moves beyond the classroom to sites of public memory. Obermark presents three case studies of recently established historical museums that take on the rhetorically complex task of representing trauma: the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the National World War I Museum, and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. Using rhetorical and comparative analysis of data gathered from the museums, along with intersectional, transdisciplinary frameworks, each chapter theorizes an aspect of rhetoric. The three aspects are identification, collectivity and memory, and the chapters bring rhetorical theory into current conversations about civic engagement and social justice. The book weaves together many voices and perspectives, and it closes by considering memory as a productive pedagogical topos for both public rhetoric and university rhetoric and writing classrooms. It is written for scholars, students and teachers who want to bring the difficult, complicated teaching that museums do with hard history back into the classroom and into civic discourse.
ISBN: 9780809338504
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