Researching the Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology

Full course description

In both scholarly literature and in the professional world, museums, galleries, and biennales are widely understood to be a space for not only public exhibition, but also for fomenting public debate. How though do exhibitions play a role in generating public response, in intervening and interacting, particularly around controversial topics? This course on The Public Life of Exhibitions equips you with conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing the confluence of the arts and sciences in public exhibitions. We cover three dimensions of an exhibition’s life and three related methods of study: (1) what was put on display and made visually available (visual analysis), (2) what materials were created and circulated about the exhibition (archival analysis), and (3) what discursive statements were made about the exhibition itself, and the arguments that it put forward (discourse analysis). It is designed to be tailored to each student’s particular interests in combining these dimensions and methods, and for attending to offline and/or online lives of public exhibitions. In these ways, The Public Life of Exhibitions enables the student to research the cultures of arts, sciences and (digital) technologies through the interdisciplinary, politically demanding, and socially relevant site of particular exhibitions.