Museum Rhetoric

Download or read book Museum Rhetoric written by M. Elizabeth Weiser and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today’s diverse societies, museums are the primary institutions within the public sphere in which individuals can both engage critical thought and celebrate community. This volume uses the lens of rhetoric to explore the role these societal repositories play in establishing and altering cultural heritage and national identity. Based on fieldwork conducted in over sixty museums in twenty-two countries across six continents, Museum Rhetoric explores how heritage museum exhibits persuade visitors to unite their own sense of identity with that of the broader civic society and how the latter changes in response. Elizabeth Weiser examines what compels communities, organizations, and nations to create museum spaces, and how museums operate as sites of both civic engagement and rhetorical persuasion. Moving beyond rhetorical explorations of museums as “memory sites,” she shows how they intentionally straddle the divides between style and content, intellect and affect, and unity and diversity, and why their portrayal of the past matters to civic life—and particularly studies of nationalism—in the present and future. Deeply researched and artfully argued, Museum Rhetoric sheds light on the public impact of cultural and aesthetic heritage and opens avenues of inquiry for scholars of museum studies and public history.

Download or read book Places of Public Memory written by Greg Dickinson and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2010-08-02 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains central to personal, communal, and national identities. And although popular and public discourses from speeches to films invite a shared sense of the past, official sites of memory such as memorials, museums, and battlefields embody unique rhetorical principles. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside acci

Download or read book Figures of Memory written by Michael Bernard-Donals and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2016-03-25 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Figures of Memory examines how the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, uses its space and the design of its exhibits to "move" its visitors to memory. From the objects and their placement to the architectural design of the building and the floor plan, the USHMM was meant to teach visitors about the Holocaust. But what Michael Bernard-Donals found is that while they learn, and remember, the Holocaust, visitors also call to mind other, sometimes unrelated memories. Partly this is because memory itself works in multidirectional ways, but partly it's because of decisions made in the planning that led to the creation of the museum. Drawing on material from the USHMM's institutional archive, including meeting minutes, architectural renderings, visitor surveys, and comments left by visitors, Figures of Memory is both a theoretical exploration of memory—its relation to identity, space, and ethics—and a practical analysis of one of the most discussed memorials in the United States. The book also extends recent discussions of the rhetoric of memorial sites and museums by arguing that sites like the USHMM don't so much "make a case for" events through the act of memorialization, but actually displace memory, disturbing it—and the museum visitor—so much so that they call it into question. Memory, like rhetorical figures, moves, and the USHMM moves its visitors, figuratively and literally, both to and beyond the events the museum is meant to commemorate.

Download or read book New Museum Theory and Practice written by Janet Marstine and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Museum Theory and Practice is an original collection ofessays with a unique focus: the contested politics and ideologiesof museum exhibition. Contains 12 original essays that contribute to the field whilecreating a collective whole for course use. Discusses theory through vivid examples and historicaloverviews. Offers guidance on how to put theory into practice. Covers a range of museums around the world: from art tohistory, anthropology to music, as well as historic houses,cultural centres, virtual sites, and commercial displays that usethe conventions of the museum. Authors come from the UK, Canada, the US, and Australia, andfrom a variety of fields that inform cultural studies.

Download or read book Pedagogies of Public Memory written by Jane Greer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pedagogies of Public Memory explores opportunities for writing and rhetorical education at museums, archives, and memorials. Readers will follow students working and writing at well-known sites of international interest (e.g., the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), at local sites (e.g., vernacular memorials in and around Muncie, Indiana and the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania), and in digital spaces (e.g., Florida State University’s Postcard Archive and The Women’s Archive Project at the University of Nebraska Omaha). From composing and delivering museum tours, to designing online memorials that challenge traditional practices of public grief, to producing and publishing a magazine containing the photographs and stories of individuals who lived through historic moments in the Freedom Struggle, to expanding and creating new public archives – the pedagogical projects described in this volume create richly textured learning opportunities for students at all levels – from first-year writers to graduate students. The students and faculty whose work is represented in this volume undertake to reposition the past in the present and to imagine possible new futures for themselves and their communities. By exploring the production of public memory, this volume raises important new questions about the intersection of rhetoric and remembrance.

Download or read book Heritage Keywords written by Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated at the intersection of scholarship and practice, Heritage Keywords positions cultural heritage as a transformative tool for social change. This volume unlocks the persuasive power of cultural heritage—as it shapes experiences of change and crafts present and future possibilities from historic conditions—by offering new ways forward for cultivating positive change and social justice in contemporary social debates and struggles. It draws inspiration from deliberative democratic practice, with its focus on rhetoric and redescription, to complement participatory turns in recent heritage work. Through attention to the rhetorical edge of cultural heritage, contributors to this volume offer innovative reworkings of critical heritage categories. Each of the fifteen chapters examines a key term from the field of heritage practice—authenticity, civil society, cultural diversity, cultural property, democratization, difficult heritage, discourse, equity, intangible heritage, memory, natural heritage, place, risk, rights, and sustainability—to showcase the creative potential of cultural heritage as it becomes mobilized within a wide array of social, political, economic, and moral contexts. This highly readable collection will be of interest to students, scholars, and professionals in heritage studies, cultural resource management, public archaeology, historic preservation, and related cultural policy fields. Contributors include Jeffrey Adams, Sigrid Van der Auwera, Melissa F. Baird, Alexander Bauer, Malcolm A. Cooper, Anna Karlström, Paul J. Lane, Alicia Ebbitt McGill, Gabriel Moshenska, Regis Pecos, Robert Preucel, Trinidad Rico, Cecelia Rodéhn, Joshua Samuels, Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels, and Klaus Zehbe.

Download or read book Participatory Critical Rhetoric written by Michael Middleton and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly, rhetorical scholars are using fieldwork and other ethnographic, performance, and qualitative methods to access, document, and analyze forms of everyday in situ rhetoric rather than using already documented texts. In this book, the authors argue that participatory critical rhetoric, as an approach to in situ rhetoric, is a theoretically, methodologically, and praxiologically robust approach to critical rhetorical studies. This book addresses how participatory critical rhetoric furthers understanding of the significant role that rhetoric plays in everyday life through expanding the archive of rhetorical practices and texts, emplacing rhetorical critics in direct conversation with rhetors and audiences at the moment of rhetorical invention, and highlighting marginalized voices that might otherwise go unnoticed. This book organizes the theoretical and methodological foundations of participatory critical rhetoric through four vectors that enhance conventional rhetorical approaches: 1) the political commitments of the critic; 2) rhetorical reflexivity and the role of the embodied critic; 3) emplaced rhetoric and the interplay between the field, text, and context; and 4) multiperspectival judgment that is informed by direct participation with rhetors and audiences. In addition to laying the groundwork and advocating for the approach, Participatory Critical Rhetoric also offers significant contributions to rhetorical theory and criticism more broadly by revisiting the field’s understanding of core topics such as role of the critic, text/context, audience, rhetorical effect, and the purpose of criticism. Further, it enhances theoretical conversations about material rhetoric, place/space, affect, intersectional rhetoric, embodiment, and rhetorical reflexivity.