Producing Public Memory: Museums, Memorials, and Archives as Sites for Teaching "Writing"

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Jane Greer and Laurie Grobman, editors
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We invite proposals from teachers, scholars, and researchers in composition, literacy, and rhetorical studies for an edited collection that investigates museums, memorials (permanent, temporary, and spontaneous), and archives as sites of rhetorical education. More particularly, we seeks essays that can help to initiate a new pedagogical phase in the study of public memory by moving beyond rhetorical analyses of museums, memorials, and archives to focus instead on the rich pedagogical and public work that can take place when faculty and students collaborate with museum founders, curators, exhibit designers, archivists, librarians, and others.
In recent years, scholars and teachers in rhetoric, print culture, and writing studies have increasingly been fascinated by the persuasive work accomplished by museums, memorials, archives, and similar sites (e.g., Bernard-Donals; Dickinson, Blair, Ott; Halloran). This diverse, interdisciplinary body of scholarship has certainly enriched contemporary understandings of how public memory is created and preserved. Rarely, though, have museums, memorials, archives, and other sites been seen by teachers as sites for the production of public memory and the teaching of writing. We believe consequential and collaborative pedagogical and public work can be undertaken at sites of public memory.

While the following list is not exhaustive, possible chapters in this collection may fall within these broad categories:

• Curricular arguments and analyses of how courses in public memory can contribute to the rhetorical education of undergraduates in general and writing majors in particular;

• Research studies (classroom-based, archival, ethnographic, qualitative, quantitative, etc.) on projects that have engaged students in the production of public memory at museums, memorials, and archives)

• Discussions of the relationships between the academy and the community at sites of public memory.

For more details about the types of questions the editors envision potential chapters addressing, please see a fuller CFP at .

Essays that are collaboratively authored by faculty and students and/or faculty and professionals who work in museums, memorials, and archives are particularly welcome.

Please submit a proposal, approximately 500 words, that discusses the proposed chapter to the editors—Jane Greer greerj@umkc.edu and Laurie Grobman leg8@psu.edu. Questions and queries are welcome as well. The deadline for proposal submissions is July 15, 2013.