Disability and Disciplines 2019, Liverpool Hope University

The Centre for Culture and Disability Studies (CCDS), Liverpool Hope University, hosts a biennial conference that explores interdisciplinary approaches to disability, culture, and education. This year the fifth such conference, the third to run under the Disability and Disciplines banner, was held 3–4 July. In what is becoming something of a tradition, I present here a crowdsourced, collective comment from the field, with contributions from several delegates that help to capture the flavour of the conference. Sessions relating to the arts and access have particularly caught the contributors’ imaginations this time around.

Gesine Wegner (Technische Universität [TU] Dresden), who attended for a second time, was excited to see how the participation of international delegates has further increased and contributed to the overall richness of the conference. A wide range of different cultural perspectives added to an understanding of disability as universal and yet culturally and historically specific. Among other things, this became clear throughout a number of panels and individual papers that focused on questions of accessibility. In a particularly thought-provoking talk, Noa Winter (University of Mainz) challenged common conceptions of disability and access, drawing on some of her experiences of attending academic conferences in Germany. Staging a much-needed intervention, Winter adopted the notion of “relaxed performances,” as introduced by British performance studies, to propose a new means of making academic spaces more accessible. Throughout the conference it was made explicit that, while British universities are more attuned to meeting basic standards of accessibility than some of their international counterparts, much more has to be done to bring about real change. For Wegner, the conference itself was a wonderful example of how change can, indeed, be effected if we transgress national as well as disciplinary borders to learn from one another.

Cheryl Green (Independent) commented as a filmmaker and audio producer, as well as captioner, transcriptionist, and audio describer, constantly at the tense intersection of creating work that is inaccessible by design and then making it to some degree accessible. She noted that Marinella Tomasello (University of Palermo) raised numerous elegant questions about tactile representations of visual arts as mental colonization in museums. Audio describers are not trained in critical notions such as oculonormativity and sensory hierarchy, which threaten their very job but, added Green, this is all the more reason they should be discussed. Jenni Hunt (University of Leicester) was said to pair perfectly here, as she discussed the lack of empowered representation and participation of disabled people and their stories in museums. Were disabled people to have more active participation, said Green, as contended in the panel, perhaps resolutions to the mental colonization would begin to emerge.

Jenni Hunt (University of Leicester), as a student working in the interdisciplinary space between museum studies and disability studies, was particularly fascinated by the focused panel “Art, Access, and Audio.” Hannah Thomson (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Marion Chottin (Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Lyon) gave a combined presentation about their work in French museums, pushing audio description beyond translation, into a new form of presentation that creatively responds to source material and benefits all visitors. The two speakers emphasized how works can be made accessible in ways that celebrate the multisensory way of being that blindness involves, and moves such understanding toward universality, enabling both blind and non-blind visitors to gain an embodied, corporeal understanding of art. Vanessa Warne (University of Manitoba) then spoke about work that has been done in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, acknowledging both areas that need work, and the wonderful presentation of some pieces. All the work in this panel emphasized the importance of working with blind individuals to develop audio description, while considering tactile elements and how they can be used to change and morph experience. Hearing positive examples from the field, for Hunt, gave hope that audio description will go on to play a greater role within the future of presentation, available to all museum visitors.

Emmeline Burdett (Independent) found the whole conference a very galvanizing experience, particularly because, as an independent scholar, she is somewhat isolated, and feels that...