The Sensational Museum: Theory and Practice

The Sensational Museum (TSM) is a two-year research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). In this presentation, the project lead Hannah Thompson will explore how TSM is using what we know about disability to change how museums work for everyone.

Moving beyond traditional museum access programming, which tends to focus on providing additional content for specific user groups, TSM instead investigates how museums can become universally inclusive by placing multi-sensory content at the heart of what they do. Taking a holistic approach to the entire museum ecosystem, Thompson will argue that prioritising sound and touch over sight will transform the way we think about museums for both visitors and museum professionals.

Professor Hannah Thompson Matthews (Royal Holloway, University of London) is a partially blind academic and activist. Her research focuses on the intersections between Critical Disability Studies and French Studies. Hannah is currently working on creative audio description in museums, art galleries and theatres and her notion of ‘blindness gain’. She was Production Consultant for the Donmar Warehouse’s installation BLINDNESS in 2020 and worked with a range of theatres and audio describers during her AHRC 2021-2 EDI Fellowship ‘Inclusive Description for Equality and Access’.

In April 2023 she became PI on a £1M AHRC- funded grant The Sensational Museum which aims to ‘use what we know about disability to change how museums work for everyone.’ Hannah writes about her place as a partially blind academic in a resolutely sighted world in her blog Blind Spot.

https://sensationalmuseum.org/