Mutnick

Mutnick, Deborah. "Inscribing the World: Lessons from an Oral History Project in Brooklyn." College Composition and Communication 58 (2007): 626-647.

Mutnick describes an outreach initiative--"Our Legacies: Who We Are, Where We're From"--that gathered oral histories and visual celebrations (photo-essays and the like) of her child's school building, which was celebrating its centennial. She's interested in rhetorical work/pedagogy that engages and revitalizes a public sphere, pointing to Habermas's notion that the march of capitalism essentially destroyed/privatized the public sphere. Mutnick sees the existence of "counterpublics" (various voices, including those of dissent) as hopeful, and argues that civic places are constructed by the interplay of these voices and material reality.

The oral histories and story circles comprise a material rhetoric in that they reveal material realities, conflict, and a "bottom up" narrative/s. Individual stories run the risk of fostering status quo liberalism, but projects like this contextualize with social history and allow for competing/dissenting voices. In this way, the project transcends liberalism and becomes a person-in-place, individual-in-context pedagogy. Civic engagement, in Mutnick's project, means "inquiry into meaningfulness of place, infused always with the identities of those who pass through" (643).