Rhetorics of Repair in Museums of Conscience: The Work of Civic Healing

This book reconceptualizes Kenneth Burke’s comic frame as a critical method for analyzing how publics can be invited into difficult, unresolved conversations about collective history, identity, and justice.

Drawing on fieldwork across 12 U.S. museums of conscience, it develops the concept of rhetorics of repair – truth-sharing, communal healing, restorative justice, and disciplined hope – as patterned practices through which these sites operationalize a comic-frame stance. Rather than simply persuading or informing, these museums stage encounters in which visitors are positioned to confront precarity, reconsider inherited narratives, and participate in the ongoing remaking of a civic “we.” Readers will gain a new understanding of how rhetorical invitation – across narrative, spatial arrangement, and polyphonic curation – can sustain engagement without foreclosing disagreement. More broadly, it demonstrates how this reconceived comic frame provides transferable strategies for addressing conflict in public life and rebuilding a more capacious and resilient civic identity.

The book offers both a theoretical reframing and a set of analytical tools and will appeal to scholars and students of rhetoric, museum and heritage studies, and public humanities, as well as museum professionals and civic educators.

M. Elizabeth Weiser is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, USA.