Blind Spot

THE SENSATIONAL MUSEUM: USING WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT DISABILITY TO CHANGE HOW MUSEUMS WORK FOR EVERYONE. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a love-hate relationship with museums, esp...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-sensational-museum.html

** UPDATE: 13/04/22 ** THE LOUVRE GOT IN TOUCH THE DAY AFTER I PUBLISHED MY POST. THEY APOLOGIZED FOR THE CURRENT SITUATION, THANKED ME FOR MY FEEDBACK AND HAVE PROMISED TO WORK ON BETTER ...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-louve-museum-accessible-to-all.html

The Spanish Gallery is “the UK’s first gallery dedicated to the art, history, and culture of Spain”. It opened on 15 October 2021 in the small market town of Bishop Auckland, County Durham...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-spanish-gallery-in-bishop-auckland.html

This week I visited the Bowes Museum in Teeside. It is a museum I last visited as a child. I had fond memories of the grandiose architecture, and I used to love the wonderful mechanical silver s...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2021/08/smartify-at-bowes-museum.html

I am delighted to announce that I have been awarded one of 10 new Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Fellowships for my project on inclusive audio desc...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2021/01/ahrc-fellowship-annoucement-inclusive.html

Image description: a photo of my standing to the right of a poster for the Donmar Warehouse's production of BLINDNESS. I am smiling broadly. Dark glasses cover my eyes and the top of my whit...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2020/08/blindness-at-donmar-warehouse.html

Image Description: The painting 'Man Proposes, God Disposes' by Sir Edwin Landseer hangs in its lavish golden frame among other paintings on a rich red wall in Royal Holloway's Picture Gall...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2020/06/audio-description-at-royal-holloway.html

Critical Disability Studies is flourishing in Anglo-American academia but it is still an emerging discipline in France. Four years ago I was delighted to speak at a ground-breaking French confere...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2019/12/new-book-discours-et-representations-du.html

I've been doing a lot of thinking about audio description recently. Ahead of this year's Academy Awards Ceremony, I wrote an article for The Conversation about why I think film awards like the O...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2019/02/audio-description-and-oscars.html

This image shows myself and fellow panel members Lyubomyr Pokotylo (CAFE Audio Description Commentary Network) and Julian Ronca (AD Commentator, Olympic Marseille) listening to Alan March de...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2018/11/3rd-international-cafe-conference-bilbao.html

This is the text of my inaugural lecture, 'Blindness Gain and the Art of Non-Visual Reading', which I delivered at Royal Holloway on 30 October 2018. An image of me delivering my inaugural ...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2018/10/blindness-gain-and-art-of-non-visual.html

Co-organizing the 2015 Blind Creations conference with Vanessa Warne was one of the highlights of my academic career. As this post written in the conference's aftermath shows, the event was mem...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2018/09/blindness-arts-disability-studies_5.html

As part of a research project I am running over the summer, we are offering volunteers the chance to come and experience a truly multisensory and immersive museum or gallery visit. See below for ...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2018/07/multisensory-museums-volunteers-wanted.html

The winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. It is a clever, moving and deeply imaginative book and a worthy winner. But if the judges had read...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-man-booker-prize-for-audio-fiction.html

This image shows the front cover of Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction by Hannah Thompson. Above the title, a hand is shown reading a sheet of Braille.  I am delighted to announce that...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/09/reviewing-blindness-in-french-fiction.html

As part of my ongoing work on creative audio description, I have been collecting different ways of experiencing museums. In March I had two very different experiences at the Ashmolean Museum in O...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/07/a-sensory-tour-of-watts-gallery.html

When I heard that a French musical about the life of Louis Braille was opening in London my heart sank. How, I wondered, could the production possibly avoid the stereotypes of blindness in a gen...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-braille-legacy-irony-of-lack-of.html

I began Blind Spot Blog immediately after my first research trip to the Valentin Haüy library and museum in Paris in February 2012. My first post is full of excitement at the rare and precious ...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/05/precious-blindness-archive-and-museum.html

This image shows the front cover of Vanessa Potter's book. The title - Patient H69  - is presented in the style of the familiar Snellen eye chart. The subtitle - The Story of my Second S...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/05/book-review-patient-h69.html

As part of some scoping work for my new research project on creative and collaborative audio description, I have been experiencing AD in various settings. Last week I went to a high-profile (and ...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/03/audio-description-in-art-gallery-2.html

This image is a screenshot from the Ashmolean website. It is made up of three panels. The left-hand panel gives the title of the exhibition, in the middle is a picture of a mother and child ...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/03/audio-description-in-art-gallery.html

Making a crowdfunding pledge is always a bit of a gamble. You are agreeing to back something that you like the sound of, but unless others do the same, there is no guarantee that your support wil...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/01/crowdfunding-appeal-please-support-cull.html

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is a wonderful book. And it is a powerful example of the value added to a book by its audio version. It is the story of a family - a father, a mother a...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/01/audio-books-and-disability-gain.html

This image is the cover of the DVD: it is a shot of Michelle's legs waiting at a pedestrian crossing in the dark. Her white cane is also shown. She is wearing bright pink ballet pumps and mi...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/01/best-and-most-beautiful-things.html

2016 has been a dark year for me. I'm not (just) using 'dark' here for its metaphoric (and ocularcentric) meanings of ''sad' and 'gloomy'. I also mean that my two cataract operations , not to men...

http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2016/11/my-love-affair-with-audio-books.html