In this episode Mariana interviewed Professor Hannah Thompson, a partially blind academic and activist whose work focuses on the intersections between critical disability studies and French studies.
Transcription of the podcast episode:
Mariana: Hi everyone, welcome to this new episode of the DARCI podcast, the podcast on Disability, Accessibility and Representation in the Creative Industries. My name is Mariana López and I’m a professor in sound production and post-production at the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York. And today I have the pleasure of welcoming Professor Hannah Thompson from Royal Holloway, University of London. Hannah is a partially blind academic and activist. Her research focuses on the intersections between critical disability studies and French studies, and she has published three monographs and numerous papers on 19th century French literature. 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 Warehouses installation ‘Blindness’ in 2020 and worked with a range of theatres and audio describers during her AHRC 2021/2022 EDI fellowship; Inclusive Description for Equality and Access. In April 2023 she became PI on a £1 million 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’. Hannah, thank you so much for joining us for today’s episode. How are you doing today? I’m good, thank you. Thanks for inviting me. Well, I’m looking forward to our conversation and I thought we could get started by talking about how your work is related to crossovers between French studies and critical disability studies and I was wondering if you could tell the listeners a bit about how you came about connecting these two fields and what had been for you the most interesting findings that came out from this connection?
Hannah: Yeah, sure. So I started off as a French literary scholar and as I was reading French texts and doing my research I became increasingly interested in the representation of the body in the French texts and I particularly started off being interested in gender, representations of gender and then I started looking at kind of taboo bodies, so bodies that are present in French texts but not overtly described by writers because of kind of worries about reader sensibilities or censorship and that led me to notice that a lot of the bodies that are present in 19th century French texts are I guess non-normative and so I started thinking about how French realist texts which are really interested in telling and describing kind of the world as it is in all its kind of gritty gory detail, how these texts avoid describing disability and they use a lot of kind of metaphors or kind of you know ways of kind of referring to something without actually naming it and so then I started thinking about you know how that relates to critical disability studies which was a field that I was becoming interested in because of my own lived experience as a disabled person. I’d never really thought about my disability as part of my academic work you know when I was doing my PhD for example or in my first years as a lecturer and then suddenly I noticed that what I was the things that I was thinking about my research texts were similar to those things to what I was thinking about kind of my place in the world and so that’s kind of how the connection came about.
Mariana: Oh thank you so much that’s really really interesting and quite recently in 2023 you started as a principal investigator for the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project the Sensational Museum and congratulations on winning your grant this is a great achievement. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about this project.
Hannah: Yeah sure so it does when you when you say it it sounds like it’s really really far away from my work on 19th century French literature but actually in fact the way that I started getting into this work thinking about museums was through audio description. So audio description I’m a keen audio description user and I’m also a translator between French and English and I teach French translation and I’ve increasingly been thinking about audio description as a kind of translation and so therefore the same theoretical approach that I discuss in terms of literary translation can also be applied to audio description and then I started noticing you know how good audio description can be but how it’s not necessarily always marketed as a tool for the general public even though there are lots of situations in which audio description can really enhance everyone’s experiences be that in film or at the theatre or in museums and so it was really thinking about museums as a place where lots of people struggle to access information but without even realizing that they’re struggling or without acknowledging that and that you know there’s a kind of disconnect between all the amazing work that museums do for people who belong to groups who’ve had kind of additional needs identified so you know for blind blind visitors or neurodiverse visitors or children and families there’s all this amazing provision but it’s not it’s always seen as kind of additional or extra and not a core part of the museum offering so what I wanted to think about in this project is what happens if we take what we know about disability and what museums already do for disabled visitors and flip it so that that becomes the main thing that museums do that they offer to everyone so that in other words we’re taking this great provision and we’re kind of saying what would happen if we put that at the centre of what museums do rather than at the margins and so to do that we need to think about exhibitions and communications with the public and that’s you know there’s often a lot of impact and engagement work happening in that area but we also what makes this project a bit different is that it always also thinks about the cataloging and the kind of behind the scenes work that happens to you know between museum professionals and objects before they get anywhere near the public. And so we’re kind of looking at ways in which we can we can help professionals museum professionals to include multi-sensory information or to think about objects in a more multi-sensory way and that’s kind of a mind shift in the way people think. And then this will hopefully mean that eventually anyone any person can go to a museum and use whatever senses they want to to access the information that is there.
Mariana: Thank you so much that’s really interesting and do you feel that by kind of using strategies that have been in the realm of accessibility for quite a number of years but kind of as you say making the mainstream rather than something that is done just for some visitors do you feel that that might help raise awareness of these strategies widely?
Hannah: Yeah I mean I think so I think basically a lot there’s a lot of really great stuff that’s happening but it’s just happening in kind of you know it’s not well promoted and it’s happening in little pockets around the place so we’re not kind of we’re not really suggesting that we kind of reinvent the wheel we’re basically saying this… you know… we already have the capabilities and the resources and the expertise to do this work but at the moment where you know organizations are underestimating its importance or its value for everyone but so you know that it once hopefully we’ll create we’re creating some resources and eventually there’ll be some kind of examples of the kind of things we’re talking about and then we’re going to evaluate you know how the public how the general public relate to these these examples and hopefully that will give us the kind of data that we need to show museums that you know this is actually in fact a very cost effective and scalable you know way of making the most of the resources they’ve already created but just kind of spreading you know opening them out to different audiences.
Mariana: Well that’s great and it kind of reminds me I’m a huge fan of the work of Constance Klassen and her work on sensorial experiences in museums and the importance of kind of thinking about how kind of museums with their kind of focus on visual experiences have removed a lot of the kind of of the senses that people would have let’s say originally used to connect to those pieces of art of or in their original context so it’s great to see kind of that expand to general audiences and hopefully opens up conversations about the origins of some of the pieces.
Hannah: Yeah I mean yeah I mean you know artifacts particularly art but not just art are all very you know they’re very connected to the human body in terms of the way they were made you know they were made by you know in a very you know often a very tactile way for example so it feels like we need to remember that when we’re experiencing them as well.
Mariana: Yeah absolutely now and just a follow-up that just came came to my mind can you tell us a bit about the museums that you’re collaborating with?
Hannah: Yeah so it’s a big multi-disciplinary interdisciplinary project so we’ve got so first of all there are four academic institutions involved so my institution Royal Holloway also got a co-investigator from the University of Westminster and the University of Leicester Museum Studies Programme and Digital Institute are also involved and the University of Lincoln and then we’ve been we’ve got partners on the project who are kind of the museum professionals kind of umbrella organizations so groups like the well the museums association, the group for education in museums the collections trust because that and the Scottish Museums Federation and the idea is that they will give us access to a huge range of different kinds of museum so that we can really reach a big audience with our you know at every phase so every phase of the project we’re consulting with a range of museum professionals across the country we’ve also been doing quite a lot of consultation with curating for change with the disabled curators that are part of that program and now we’re just entering the pilot phase of the project and so we’ve actually got 11 museums across the UK well actually in fact they’re all I think they’re all in there they’re all they’re all in England but you know we were hoping to get a you know from across the UK which we’ve got but the point is we’ve got a range of museums you know kind of a small local museums independent museums local authority museums rural museums kind of urban museums so that we can test our resources our well our processes our resources and then eventually the the things that that we make out of these resources with a with a range of museums and then hopefully we’ll be able to report back to the to the sector and show how you know you know different museums of different sizes and different kind of capabilities can can operate I mean you know it’s so museums are one of the sectors which are who are really kind of struggling for financial you know financial support and that they’re very kind of time money and time poor so we need to we need to make sure that we’re not you know we’re not producing something too too time intensive or too complicated but we’ve been really overwhelmed with the the levels of enthusiasm coming from museums you know we did a kind of application process to find our partner museums our pilot museums and we had we had way more applicants than we could and we could include in the project so hopefully there’ll be there’ll be kind of some scope further down the line to send out the resources to more places.
Hannah: Well thank you so much that’s really great to hear more about the project and you know I can’t wait to see what the results are and I’m sure there’s going to be loads of lessons learned for the sectors and and probably they will extend to other other parts of the cultural industry as well.
Hannah: I mean hopefully we’re talking to libraries as well and archives and you know heritage heritage sites so you know kind of houses and gardens as well as your kind of traditional museum so hopefully yeah it’s going to have you know wide wide impact.
Mariana: Cool and before the Sensational Museum you worked as a fellow for the Inclusive Description for Equality and Access Project can you tell us about what the focus of that project was and what did it involve?
Hannah: Yeah so this was this is one of the AHRC EDI fellowships and I it was very focused on… it was focused on audio description in theatres and it was specifically focused on how subscribers can create descriptions which capture the kind of bodily reality and diversity of performers and so we talked to actors, describers and other theatre professionals such as you know stage managers, producers, directors, creatives and also we talked to audio description users and we found there’s quite a there’s an interesting tension between the desire to give the visually or the partially the blind or partially blind person a good sense of what’s happening on stage but then a little bit of you know feeling a little bit uncomfortable about spelling out some of the kind of visible physical differences that are apparent so for example disability, skin colour, body shape so we wanted to kind of find a way that we could be honest and clear about what’s happening on stage without you know kind of offending or upsetting actors or directors and so it was kind of we did a lot of workshops with actors and music and theatre professionals to kind of explain what’s at stake in audio description and that for a blind or partially blind person it’s as much part of the experience as sound design or set or props or casting but it’s not given the same level of importance by theatres so it tends to happen a little bit off to one side you know often or almost always with no input from actors or directors so that the the describers are kind of you know doing their thing and but it doesn’t have a very clear relationship to the actual artistic production that it’s part of you know it’s seen as as an access tool like a ramp or a hearing loop but in fact it’s much more creative and it has much more of an impact on the way that the listener engages with the show so it was kind of a it was a kind of about you know raising awareness of the role of audio description getting creative people invested in the fact it’s a creative process and then kind of exploring what happens when you’re more transparent about the process you get actors involved you get you get other creatives involved and and seeing if that can create a kind of more fulfilling audio description for everyone.
Mariana: Well thank you very much and that kind of brings us really nicely to the next question I was going to ask you and it’s back in 2018 so a few years ago you published an article titled audio description turning access to film into cinema art and disability studies quarterly and this is an article in which you explore kind of exactly what you were just just telling us about how audio description is part for blind and visually impaired audiences is part of that creative experience as important as cinematography sound design etc and therefore kind of your argument as you just were explaining is that a kind of creatives should engage more actively with it and I have to say that your work has been very kind of influential in my own way of thinking and in particular I am very fond of this this article. And you wrote this in 2018 are we closer to a greater involvement of filmmakers in accessibility?
Hannah: That’s a really good question. I mean I think there’s certainly more awareness amongst filmmakers of the existence and importance of audio description and I think there’s also an appreciation amongst audio describers that it’s important to talk about the creative elements of the film of cinematography for example. So I’ve noticed that there are more references to kind of the way a shot is filmed you know so I mean I you know so they’ll kind of try and evoke the atmosphere of the shot rather than just telling you what’s happening. But I also think that most certainly mainstream audio description is done post-production and it’s generally done by a company who is not otherwise involved in the film. So you know it’s a specialist audio description company so I think that kind of necessarily means that the main players in the film the director the producer the scriptwriter that kind of means they inevitably don’t have enough control over audio description and I think that’s because it’s just it’s still not yet taken seriously as a creative element and I think actually interestingly in France they have started having an award for the best audio description each year. So what they do is they take the films that are shortlisted for the César which is the best French film in the kind of and they send them out to a jury of blind and partially blind people and they basically get them to vote on which has the best audio description. I’m not completely clear what the criteria are I’m not sure whether it’s kind of you know the most enjoyable or the most you know the most engaging or gave you the most kind of insight or whatever but it does really raise the the kind of visibility if you like of audio description and its importance and I think you know that’s kind of what we need to think about what we need we need kind of mainstream providers to you know I mean we need an Oscar for best audio description yes that’s the only way really that I think people are going to take it seriously but I also think we need things like you can’t be nominated for the Oscars unless you have audio description you know I think I feel like people still see it as a bit of an option a bit of a nice add-on but if we run out of budget it’s something that we can drop you know so until it’s really taken seriously from the very beginning of the process integrated into the process of making the film from the beginning which would ultimately be cheaper than adding it on at the end and maybe even integrated into the script rather than having to be added additionally yeah there’s still a lot of scope and I think I think cinema is quite far behind theatre in that you know I think there’s there’s some really great creative audio description that started happening integrated audio description but I’m not seeing that in film or television as yet.
Mariana: Yeah I completely agree about the difference with theatre and I always I always tell my students when I teach this topic so actually I think theatre is more advanced in how accessibility is thought of in certain productions and I have a question for you why do you think what why do you think there is a difference?
Hannah: Um that’s a really good question I think in terms of how far ahead theatre is I think there’s it’s a lot easier to for for audio describers and audiences to access kind of to influence theatre companies because well certainly in the UK because they they tend to be smaller and they tend to already have quite strong outreach and community and education programs so a lot of theatre companies you know part of their mission is to get theatre out to people who are not necessarily experiencing it and that’s just not the same with kind of your major film companies and you know and then there are also probably inevitably like commercial reasons as well. But I think probably there’s just fundamentally I think it’s that that people non-blind people don’t understand the way that audio description can make film accessible but you know they kind of don’t appreciate the significance it plays that you know that that’s its significance and perhaps don’t understand how you know that most blind people have some sight and therefore have you know we’re not talking about we’re not just talking about kind of a group of people who don’t who don’t understand who don’t who don’t know what sight is who don’t know what light is who don’t know what colour is you know people who are blind from birth are very small or totally blind from birth or a very small percentage of the people who would find audio description useful so I think some of it’s just around kind of lack of awareness and yeah, a general kind of view that it’s potentially more of a luxury than a necessity and that it’s not relevant to the most people who who go to the cinema. And there’s no there’s no kind of like financial incentive or even legal incentive to really engage with it so I think you know it just gets lost.
Mariana: Yeah that’s interesting and yes this idea of raising awareness but also as you were saying before this this idea that it’s not recognized um at the same creative level through awards etc but I was thinking something that always comes to mind when I think about accessibility is how similar in a way is to um environmental sustainability so we think you know kind of schemes for environmental sustainability in film and television are now kind of more regulated so if you want to get certain funding you actually need to be able to kind of complete an assessment of your carbon footprint before you’re able to actually gain that funding and more and more broadcasters and streaming services are actually asking for productions to make a commitment to sustainability and to be certified. And I always kind of wonder if there is kind of a similarity there um in well maybe you know productions need to be incentivized to produce this it’s a starting point to then hopefully become more intrinsically interested.
Hannah: Yeah I think that’s unfortunately we have you know we have to kind of recognize the reality of the fact that you know organizations will will do what they have to do first and so yeah I think financial incentives um is a really good way of of kind of making sure this happens and yeah you can’t we you know you won’t be distributed or you won’t be funded or whatever unless you’ve done xyz. I think um and I’m and I’m reasonably confident that this will happen at some point it’s just you know there needs to be a kind of tipping point where enough people understand its value before that happens.
Mariana: Part of me though and you know I feel it’s it’s kind of I don’t know how you feel but I feel it’s frustrating that that’s what needs to happen for people to recognize its importance one would kind of I think naively I would want people to just do it because you know it’s a right thing and it provides access to a greater number of people but um I fear that might be very naive on my side.
Hannah: And I feel like also because we’re talking about film and filmmaker has a very specific vision of how they want the film to be um they’re a little bit anxious about adding things because it may well detract from you know what they’d wanted to do in the first place and I’ve certainly um you know come across people being quite defensive about you know we can’t we can’t you know… I don’t want the the audio described version to be out in the world for everyone because it’s not artistically it doesn’t have the same artistic integrity as my final cut. Um you know and but the answer to that is well give it the same artistic integrity you know like make creative decisions about the audio description don’t outsource it to a to a company who don’t know who don’t understand your vision do it in-house because then you can control the audio description and it could be it could actually be an enhanced version of the of the film.
Mariana: Yeah and and that definitely just speaks as you know very very kind of closely to the enhanced audio description methods we work on in which we actually work with filmmakers we have discussions as to how to create the accessible layer for the film we work on sound design strategies and it’s been um kind of at a personal level and for the filmmakers we worked on it has been rewarding on all sides because we all end up with a version that well a kind of visually impaired people tell us you know it’s accessible and it works for them but also filmmakers feel proud of and they want it to be out there and they want to talk.
Hannah: Yeah exactly I mean that’s yeah and I think I think the enhancing audio description project is absolutely crucial and it’s completely leading the way in doing that for film and and finding you know like actual kind of filmic techniques which promote audio description or which give space for audio description and you know and allow it to exist as an integral part of the film I think is is really exciting and you know things like um I don’t know… slowing slowing things down a bit or even like pausing or having like a longer shot so there’s more space for for words and you know I think there’s some really exciting creative solutions which you know um you know can can really make audio description into a creative… it’s I mean… as far as I’m concerned it’s an art it’s kind of… it’s you know… it’s like an equivalent of creative writing it’s it’s you know it’s a it’s a creative response to the visual um elements of the film and the more we value it as in its own right as an art form you know as has started to happen with um audio description of paintings you know um the more we value it as a as an art form this this the more prevalent it’ll become.
Mariana: I think yeah and something that I was wanted to ask you a bit more about that I think will connect nicely to this is um I had the pleasure of reading your bio at the start of this episode and you talk about the concept of blindness gain and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about it.
Hannah: Yeah so blindness gain is is basically a concept that I’ve that I’ve kind of developed based on the work um on disability gain and and deaf gain so in both cases it’s the idea that something which was created as an access tool has become useful and valid for a wider group of people so the classic example in in disability gain is kind of the ramps the little that well the curb cuts that you have to let to let wheelchairs roll off a curb onto a street onto a onto a road. Um and obviously now they’re hugely… they’re kind of universal and they’re hugely used by people with luggage or wheelchair oh sorry pushchair users or skateboarders you know um so it’s a way of showing that things that start you know that the things that kind of started as a response to a particular disability have you know actually have a much wider kind of broader um benefits and so what I what I’ve done with blindness gain is I’ve kind of argued that blindness yeah because traditionally blindness is always seen as a deficit or a lack you know lack of sight. Um I’ve kind of argued that that we should flip this and think of blindness as a as a kind of creative imaginative you know exciting way of being not worse just different and in some ways it has advantages because it reminds us of our other senses which the visually dependent people um that’s a that’s a phrase that Georgina Klieg uses that I really like you know visually visually dependent people kind of sighted people are so reliant on their sense of sight that they because of the the kind of visual focus of the world and you know that that they forget about the other senses and what using them the benefits that using them can bring um and so uh you know or um I mean the talking book is the best example of blindness gain that I have it it was it was originally you know invented um after after the war for for blind veterans by blind veterans um and it was you know even when I you know even kind of when I was growing up talking books were very difficult to get they were they were only for blind people and then suddenly you know in the last I guess 10-15 years, uh audiobooks have become mainstream so everyone everyone accesses them everywhere there are millions you know it’s it’s a you know but that started as something very specific but now people are realizing that you don’t have to read with your eyes they’re actually listening is just as you know just as valid and just as exciting and so that’s an example of blindness gain it’s basically a way of celebrating blindness and pushing back against the kind of deficit models of disability.
Mariana: A final question I’d like to ask everyone that comes on the podcast is what are your hopes for the future of disability accessibility and representation in the creative industries?
Hannah: That’s a really good question so I guess my ultimate hope is that um we know we no longer need to think about access accommodations um because they’re always integrated into everything so you know there’s always more than one way of accessing whatever it is that we’re talking about so a film will automatically have um uh either integrated audio description or an audio description track which is completely integral to it uh it’ll also have a transcript it’ll also have you know um an audio introduction which describes the kind of look of the and feel of the piece and that will just be as integral or as as usual as producing a press pack producing a poster producing you know all that stuff which is so essential which is seen as so essential and costs so much money um will you know will include the access stuff. So you know people who you know will no longer have to have to ask questions about “Does it have audio description?”
Mariana: Yeah.
Hannah: Um it’ll just… that won’t be a question that one needs to ask. That’s my ultimate um hope. Uh it’s quite a long-term goal, um, I think I think anything you know I think we’ll get you know just … medium term I guess it’s just like that people yeah understand the importance of accessibility, stop seeing it as a legal requirement and see it as a as a benefit for a wide group of people even people who wouldn’t necessarily instinctively define themselves as um as blind or partially blind but who just like to access information in a variety of different ways.
Mariana: Oh and what wonderful hopes. Medium term and long term for the future. So thank you so much for sharing those and thank you so much for joining us for today’s episode it’s been lovely to have a chat about uh your work today!
Hannah: It’s a pleasure thank you so much for inviting me.
Mariana: Thank you so much everyone for joining us for this really exciting episode I have learned a lot and I hope you have as well. Tune in for a brand new episode next month with a new exciting guest.
