Durable Effects: Public Writing and the Children's Peace Statue Project

Drawing on new materialist and public writing scholarship, this essay advocates for public writing projects that foreground "distributed action" by pursuing "material ends." Analyzing the rhetorical consequences and pedagogical potential of the Children's Peace Statue Project (1990-1995), a student-led activist project to fund, design, and dedicate in Los Alamos an international peace statue to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I argue that such projects foreground "durability": the slow grind of rhetorical action, its reliance on multiple texts composed and circulated over a span of years, across numerous sites, and encompassing multiple languages, registers, and media. Furthermore, through retrospective interviews with participants who contributed to this effort as children, I investigate the power of embodied learning to create durable literacy experiences--experiences that these participants reflect on vividly even twenty years after the statue was first assembled. Ultimately, understanding both "objects" and "public writing" as distributed networks foregrounds the attention to durability that I suggest needs to accompany our embrace of an ecological, distributed model of public writing.