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\nComposition Forum 36, Summer 2017  \nDurable Effects: Public Writing and the Children’s Peace Statue Project  \nRisa Applegarth  \nAbstract: 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.  \n“It’s the power exerted through entities that don’t sleep and associations that don’t break down that allow power to last longer and expand further—and, to achieve such a feat, many more materials than social compacts have to be devised.”  \n--Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, 70  \nThe children who imagined, advocated for, and eventually helped to create the Children’s Peace Statue between 1990 and 1995 almost certainly did not understand themselves as participating in a public writing project. In the years just before scholars of writing such as Susan Wells and Christian Weisser turned our field’s attention to publiclyoriented writing in college classrooms, a group of elementary, middle, and high school students from New Mexico organized tens of thousands of supporters, through a grassroots letter-writing campaign in the pre-internet era, ultimately designing and building the statue in  Figure 1  , which was dedicated in Albuquerque in August 1995 to commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fifty years earlier. Although the participants primarily understood the project through the frameworks of advocacy and peace activism, nevertheless, I suggest that their collective work on behalf of this statue can be productively understood as public writing—and, furthermore, that the explicitly material orientation of the project, which aimed to create a statue to represent the desire for peace of children around the world, can offer a powerful model for public writing projects in our current classrooms and communities.  \nCertainly, the Children’s Peace Statue project was public: Although it began in 1990 in an elementary school classroom in Albuquerque, where teachers Christine Luke and Caroline Gassner involved their 3rd-and 4th-gradersin a Future Problem Solvers lesson aimed at addressing the problem of nuclear proliferation and the threat of nuclear war, it moved quickly beyond the classroom—to the cafeteria, where students held a popcorn sale to raise money for the statue; to a local bank, where students marched to deposit the first $12 raised toward their project; and outward, to an expanding range of sites beyond the school, including local libraries, bookstores, and churches, a pizza place where monthly planning meetings were held, County Council meetings in Los Alamos, local press conferences, TV and radio interviews, classrooms around the country where children created designs for the proposed statue, and peace conferences in Salt Lake City, Seattle, and","cbCaidWQqS8OQC2h","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaidWQqS8OQC2h","pdf",3145502,18,"English","# Composition Forum 36, Summer 2017\n## Durable Effects: Public Writing and the Children’s Peace Statue Project\n## Abstract","[{\"question\":\"What central idea does the essay advance about public writing projects?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that public writing should foreground distributed action by pursuing material ends, emphasizing durability over time.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the essay analyze the Children’s Peace Statue Project (1990-1995)?\",\"answer\":\"It examines its rhetorical consequences and pedagogical potential, focusing on how students’ sustained, multi-site writing helped build the statue and support literacy development.\"},{\"question\":\"What role do participants’ retrospective interviews play?\",\"answer\":\"They demonstrate how embodied learning created durable literacy experiences that participants still vividly remember even decades later.\"}]","Durable Effects - Public Writing and the Children’s Peace Statue Project | PDF",1792087938,28]