Universal accessibility of museums: a balance between aestheticism and human encounter (Presentation)
Aude Porcedda, Professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
In French | Simultaneous interpretation in English and LSQ
This paper will present the results of research conducted in partnership with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. According to the concept of the caring museum, the role of the museum is no longer to bring the visitor to a work or content, but to encourage his or her autonomy in the face of art, history or science. In a context where Quebec’s cultural policy calls for supporting the cultural and inclusive participation of people with disabilities, the research will present physical, social and informational barriers and facilitators to cultural access identified by people living with disabilities, museum employees, and experts in the disability sector in order to formulate avenues and measures to reduce these barriers. This triangulation of results was based on three theoretical models – 1) The Cultural Accessibility Chain (Blaho-Ponce, 2013); 2) Inclusive Access inspired by the Human Development – Disability Production Process model (MDH-PPH; Fouygerollas, 2010) and 3) Access to and Understanding of Information (Ruel et al., 2019; Grenon et al., 2020) – to consider the visiting experience as a discontinuous co-construction of interests and interactions between the different people who participate in museum activities.
Aude Porcedda
Professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, director of the 21 collection at Hermann Editions (Paris), Aude Porcedda has been studying for two decades the management of change towards sustainable development and more recently the link between health and culture through the issue of universal accessibility in museum institutions. Her approach calls for going beyond the traditional opposition between values in use and values displayed and advocates for the study of the museum as an organization in its own right. At the crossroads of sociology and anthropology, his work builds the hypothesis of a “museology of relations and pluralism”.
