Dr Sophie Vohra

The main website for the 2.5-year, AHRC-funded 'The Sensational Museum' project. Includes the final outputs: Multisensory interpretation toolkit (Slark) and Multisensory collections demonstrator (Vohra). It also contains details about the project, information on the research team and further resources.

The 'Multisensory Collections Demonstrator' site, created by the Collections Strand (University of Leicester) of the 2.5-year, AHRC-funded 'The Sensational Museum' project. Conceived, designed and project managed by Dr Sophie Vohra, in collaboration with Prof Ross Parry. Built by The Museum Platform - Mike Ellis and Dr Jeremy Ottevanger. Supporting materials at https://sensationalmuseum.org

How are museum professionals in other countries approaching accessibility? In this issue, editor Jeanne Normand Goswami sat down with Drs. Charlotte Slark and Sophie Vohra of the Sensational Museum to discuss how this innovative project has approached integrating multisensory accessibility into UK museums – in visitor experiences and collections management alike. The following is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation. You can also listen to the unedited audio here.

Since the early 19th century, developments in the British railway industry have been, and continue to be, regularly celebrated through commemorative practices. These acts of remembrance for different elements of the industry’s history are presented through a series of “components” (Papadakis) including celebratory events, material culture, and literature. Crucially, these components are drawn together to create a linear narrative of “progress” that concertinas time between the historic event being remembered and the commemorative event itself. This paper will demonstrate the role of “mobilities” in the context of commemorations of British railways from the mid-19th century to the present. Focusing primarily on elements of the industry’s history connected to Britain’s East Coast Main Line, this paper will demonstrate how the coalescence of the static, the moving, and the metaphorical contribute to the pervasiveness of the mobility of linear narratives of progress over time and space, ultimately erasing the spiderweb trajectories of technological development from popular culture and memory. In doing so, it will consider the deeper relationship between vehicles of mobility and the pathways —or punctuation points—of memory they help stimulate and cement in the public consciousness.

This paper will examine the ways British railways have and continue to be celebrated by communities with regional connections to this industry’s history. Examining two different types of commemorative events – the long-running annual Camborne Trevithick Day and the planning for the bicentenary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) in the North East of England – it will demonstrate how and why communities engage with their industrial landscape and their associated symbols of railway history. Celebrating a local nineteenth-century engineer, Richard Trevithick, each year, the former has become a recurring feature of the wider culture of the Cornish town and its industrial history. The S&DR has been celebrated at every 50-year juncture since it opened in 1825. Currently in the planning stages, the bicentenary celebrations in 2025 and beyond will be ambitious, and are being designed to celebrate the history of this pioneering railway as well as to protect and conserve the heritage of the region and to benefit the local communities in the long term.

Abstract

The Sensational Museum, a UK-based, multi-institution research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), aims to challenge ableist biases in heritage sectors. The project explores how the potential of ‘multisensory’ can be leveraged to create inclusive, equitable experiences for both museum professionals and visitors. Led by the concepts of disability gain, equity, and inclusion, the project argues that no one sense should be necessary or sufficient to have rich and meaningful experiences with history and heritage. In this audio recording and descriptive transcript, Sophie Vohra and Charlotte Slark discuss their research for The Sensational Museum, and the value and impact of multisensory storytelling in their work. Using a drum from the Africa Museum as a reoccurring talking point, they expand on the complexities of shifting mindsets and practices to provide more inclusive, progressive and equitable multisensory encounters with museum collections. With insights from Canadian-based professional audio describer, J.J. Hunt, they explore how multisensory language can provide nuanced, rounded, and enhanced descriptions of museum collections and interactions with them. Moving to explore how multisensory storytelling can be embedded in interpretation and communication, Vince Dziekan shares how we can apply his ‘body, mind, soul’ framework to explore multidimensional ways to shape museum interpretation for visitors to meaningful connections with the collections. Overall, they demonstrate how multisensory storytelling can be applied to collections and communication and highlight the important role multisensory language and interpretation have in making museums more accessible, equitable and inclusive.

How do we unpick millennia of vision-centric bias while maintaining visitors’ trust? This workshop introduces The Sensational Museum (TSM), a project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. TSM rejects the “look and learn” approach that has long influenced how museums handle collections information and communicate with audiences. Grounded in research and cocreated with museum professionals, the project led a range of institutions to create environments where no one sense is necessary or sufficient. Drawing on these case studies, explore a toolkit for creating multisensory interpretation.