The Rhetoric of Participation: Interrogating Commonplaces In and Beyond the Classroom , memorializes and extends the research and legacy of Dr. Genevieve Critel. Critel’s research—and her legacy as a scholar, educator, and colleague—form the foundations for this collection. This collection presents the perspectives of twenty scholars and educators in the fields of rhetoric and composition, all of whom engage with the question, what does it mean to participate?

The Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum (OKCNMM) must balance respectful remembrance with broad education about the 1995 terrorist attack that killed one hundred and sixty-eight people. Epideictic and material rhetorics prevail throughout the OKCNMM, communicating uplifting messages about the effects of the bombing while also prompting visitors to create their own complex, productively uncomfortable pathways toward understanding. In this process, civic engagement through rhetorical processes is encouraged; the museum models and creates space to practice reflective dwelling, critical thinking, discussion, and composition, offering a rhetorical education that can circulate far beyond this single site.

“All visualizations of disability are mediations that shape the world in which people who have or do not have disabilities inhabit and negotiate together. The point is that all representations have social and political consequences. Understanding how images create or dispel disability as a system of exclusions and prejudices is a move toward the process of dismantling the institutional, attitudinal, legislative, economic, and architectural barriers that keep people with disabilities from full participation in society” —Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography (75)