Dr Lindsay Bywood, Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, and Dr Alison Eardley, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, together with Professor Hannah Thompson, Royal Holloway, University of London, have been awarded a prestigious Techne Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) in partnership with the Chelsea Physic Garden to explore how heritage gardens, like the Chelsea Physic Garden, can become more inclusive.
The Techne CDAs are doctoral studentship projects which are supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and involve the development of a partnership between a university and an organisation not part of higher education.
The collaborative partner, the Chelsea Physic Garden, which was established in 1673, is one of the oldest botanical gardens in Britain. Their historic collection includes 5,000 medicinal plants that have changed the world and the oldest rock garden in Europe. The garden staff have been working on an extensive regeneration project, since successfully gaining funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund in 2018, and establishing an inclusive accessible garden is an important part of their aims. Deputy Director of Visitor Experience at the Chelsea Physic Garden Frances Sampayo will form part of the supervisory team.
The research will be supported by VocalEyes, UK’s leading charity supporting and working to increase access to arts, culture and heritage for blind and visually impaired people, with Matthew Cock, CEO, advising the work.
The doctoral award will be taken up by Jessica Beale in September. She comes with an exciting cross-disciplinary background in arts, design and audio description. The project will investigate how historic gardens, such as the Chelsea Physic Garden, can use audio descriptive techniques to enhance access for all of their visitors. Audio description is used to facilitate access to television, film, live events, museums, sport and other events for people with limited or no sight. The work builds on ongoing research by Dr Eardley, Dr Bywood and another University of Westminster colleague, Dr Rachel Hutchinson, investigating the use of audio descriptive techniques in a virtual tour of the Chelsea Physic Garden.
This interdisciplinary project will draw on research from audiovisual translation, museum studies, psychology and critical disability studies and build on the concept of ‘blindness gain’ to examine whether the techniques used to provide access for blind and visually impaired people can also enrich the experience for sighted audiences.
The research will use a co-creation process to explore audio description as a tool for inclusive design within museums, with blind, visually impaired and sighted audiences defined as both creators and end users. This, combined with empirical data gained from the process of developing, testing and evaluating new types of inclusive audio description, will provide evidence-based guidelines for heritage organisations, which will be widely shared and promoted through museum professional and practitioner training workshops.
Talking about receiving the award, Dr Bywood said: “It's an honour to be awarded this funding, which is as a result of a genuine team effort. We are very much looking forward to working with Jessica and continuing our partnership with the Chelsea Physic Garden, VocalEyes, and Professor Thompson.”
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