Rachel M. Gans

Bio: Rachel M. Gans is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Rhetoric & Narrative. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 10 citations.

The Newseum and Collective Memory: Narrowed Choices, Limited Voices, and Rhetoric of Freedom

Abstract: Using the concepts of collective memory, the public sphere, and political econ omy, this article critically examines the narrative of the Newseum, the Freedom Forum's museum of the news. This article contends that the Newseum presents a narrative that is unresponsive to real criticism of the press, limits visitors' ability to explore alternative ideas, and does so while invoking collective memory and a rhetoric of freedom.

Participatory Media and Discourse in Heritage Museums: Co‐constructing the Public Sphere?

Abstract: This article examines public discourse that visitors produce as part of their visit to a heritage museum. With the turn to the “new museum” of the 21st century, with its extensive reliance on new media, mediation, and an interactive-participatory agenda, museums are community generators that invite and display public participation. The article inquires ethnographically into the settings offered by a new and large Jewish heritage museum in Philadelphia, for the pursuit of “ordinary” people's participatory discursive practices. The article then asks how visitors actually pursue their participation discursively, in the form of texts written on notes in response to the museum's questions. Finally, visitors' inscriptional activities are theorized in terms of current views of participation and the public sphere.

“Try to Lift Someone Else as We Climb”: 120 Years of the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh and the Women’s Movement

Abstract: In 1891, the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh met in the offices of the old Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette for the first time. Over the next 120 years, the women comprising this club found places for women in the public sphere by opening doors for newswomen. The clubwomen thus actively challenged widely held conventions about feminine limitations, and, as Hazel Garland, one of the club’s few African American members and the first woman managing editor of The Pittsburgh Courier, said, they reached behind and pulled up those women who came after them. WPCP members flew in hot air balloons, covered both WWI and WWII, funded scholarships for younger women, stood up to racism within their own ranks, and were some of the first women to enter post-game locker rooms with male sports reporters. Some activists in the women’s movement have called newswomen traitors for adhering to masculine frames of news coverage that dictate covering “both sides” of an issue, which sometimes means highlighting and publicizing an anti-women’s rights viewpoint in a story. However, this dissertation argues that mainstream female reporters should be considered in the stream of the broader women’s movement. Conventional presswomen, even those who worked on the widely excoriated woman’s pages, often were the voice of the women’s movement for a mainstream audience. While alternative presses preached to the converted, mass-audience presses persuaded the everyday person of the acceptability of previously unconventional ideas. By actively presenting themselves as the harbingers of change, seeking out and reporting issues of importance to the women’s movement, and creating opportunities for women’s professional advancement within the journalism profession, women’s press clubs like the WPCP made themselves an important resource for spreading activist ideology far and wide. Through the use of archival and oral history evidence, this dissertation shows how one of the United States’ longest-lived women’s press clubs, the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh, challenged conventions and gave voice to the nascent women’s movement, even as its members were apparently observing the dictates of the male-dominated news establishment.

From noted ‘phenomenon’ to ‘missing person’: A case of the historical construction of the unter-journalist

Abstract: Tim Hewat was celebrated during his tenure at Granada Television as one of the most influential journalists working in Britain in the second half of the 20th century, but then largely forgotten for 30 years.This is explained as a function of the specific historicization of journalists, reflecting both academic prejudices and occupational values.The history of journalism is largely devoid of the lived experiences of the majority of its practitioners. Hewat’s case indicates that journalists disappear from history when they step outside the domains of valorized media institutions and journalism hierarchies that contribute to notions such as the Fourth Estate. Mobilizing Paul Thompson’s category of ‘underclasses’, this article argues that this reductionism has largely rendered the majority of journalists historically invisible and classified them as unter-journalists , a kind of sub-category which does not comply with a priori norms.

Moral discourse and argumentation in the public sphere: Museums and their visitors

Abstract: Recent studies of moral discourse and argumentation highlight the pervasiveness of morality in everyday life, and how the public sphere is shaped by moral ‘stuff’: speech acts, narratives, accounts and the like. By taking a discourse analytic orientation, this article joins this line of research, and delineates the situated and interactional nature of moral argumentations and rhetoric. The article focuses on the role moral discourse plays in the formation of the public sphere, as conceptualized by Habermas, and specifically on moral discourse (co-)produced by museums and by their visitors. As cultural public institutions, museums play an important role in shaping the public sphere both thematically (topically) and materially (communication technologies and materialities of display and participation). In recent years, museums have shifted to more interactive modes of operation, where visitors are invited to participate in the public sphere by producing discourse in situ. This study explores museum questions and visitors responses in a large Jewish cultural/heritage museum in the Unites States. The study first looks at the museum apparatuses, through which discourse is publicly invited, produced and presented, to then study visitors’ responses as moral discourse. The analysis critically highlights the dramatic quality inherent to moral scenes, and depicts and discusses how visitors’ texts selectively address the moral Actor, Action and Motive as parts of the social moral drama they evaluate.