The Sensational Museum’s Art of Multisensory Storytelling

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.