Public is a peer-reviewed, multimedia e-journal focused on humanities, arts, and design in public life. It aspires to connect what we can imagine with what we can do. We are interested in projects, pedagogies, resources, and ideas that reflect rich engagements among diverse participants, organizations, disciplines, and sectors.
Public encourages community-engaged learning, research, and practice across boundaries through vivid description and analysis, documentation, evaluation, inquiry, and critique. It is part of the national consortium Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, committed to the relationship between culture and participatory democracy. Public is aligned with IA’s Vision, Mission, Values, and Goals.
In Public, forms including performance, literature, design, sound, historical representation, video, photography, interactive media, and texts are integrated with other types of knowledge to animate and deepen engagement with civic life. We encourage public discussion and resource sharing through online and new media, including a multimedia interface to a growing archive of issues and submissions. Public connects disciplines such as the arts in economic development, humanities and social justice, and design and environmental stewardship, and often highlights more than one perspective on its subjects through collaboration with people across traditional divisions of knowledge and from multiple contexts.