About the series

Routledge Museums In Focus is a short-format book series that challenges authors and readers to experiment with, innovate, and provoke museums and the intellectual frameworks through which we view these. It offers a platform for approaches that radically rethink the relationships between cultural and intellectual dissent and crisis and debates about museums, politics and the broader public sphere. Titles include The Disobedient Museum, Curatorial Activism, and Museums and Racism. 

Committed to the articulation of big, even risky, ideas in small format publications, Museums In Focus is motivated by the intellectual hypothesis that museums are not innately ‘useful’, 'safe’ or even ‘public’ places, and that recalibrating our thinking about them might benefit from adopting a more radical and oppositional form of logic and approach. Examining this problem requires a level of comfort with (or at least tolerance of) the idea of crisis, dissent, protest and radical thinking, and authors might benefit from considering how cultural and intellectual crisis, regeneration and anxiety have been dealt with in other disciplines and contexts.

Books published in the series are to 30,000 words in length and fully refereed. In addition to providing timely, intellectually agile cutting edge responses to topical socio-cultural and political challenges, the small books will exist themselves as collectible objects as well as in online form. Of interest to those seeking to write something longer than a journal article but shorter than a monograph, the books will attest to the contribution that museums and collections-based research make to the intellectual history of the late twentieth century at the same time as they will encourage and engage with new conceptual or methodological approaches toward complex problems embodied, reflected, or caused by museums.