Barrett: Museum Public Sphere

Museums and the Public Sphere investigates the role of museums around the world as sites of democratic public space. What are the many ways in which the museum is, or is not, public? How can the museum be understood as a critical sphere of public debate? How do museums facilitate, respond to, and intersect with wider public discourse? These questions are the key to understanding and redefining the very parameters of the museum.

Reworking the idea of the museum is critical in a world in which exhibition spaces compete with a host of other public fora - community cultural centers, public halls, and the Internet. Museums and the Public Sphere examines the implications of a more complex understanding of how the public is realized, invoked, and understood in the museum context.