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Speaker: Julia Cassim

Senior Research Fellow

The Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre, London

"Ensuring Cognitive and Physical Access to the Cultural Heritage"

Date: 14 February 2008

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Julia Cassim studied at Manchester College of Art and Design and then at Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music on a Japanese Ministry of Education postgraduate sculpture scholarship. She has an MPhil from the International Centre for Heritage Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, is a Fellow of the Royal College of Art and consultant to the Natural History Museum, London. From 1971-1998, she was resident in Japan. She was arts columnist of The Japan Times, wrote widely for other publications and founded Access Vision, a non-profit organisation for visually impaired people engaged in research on alternative modes to access and interpret museum collections of art and artefacts. She curated and designed award-winning exhibitions for audiences with visual impairments and learning disabilities. ‘Into the Light - Museums and their Visually Impaired Visitors’, her book published by Shogakkan in 1998, draws on this experience. Since 2000 she has worked at the Helen Hamlyn Centre, a centre for inclusive design at the Royal College of Art, London. (www.hhc.rca.ac.uk) where her research focus is the involvement of disabled people in the mainstream design and innovation process.

Roundtable Topic

Museums are the major public repositories of a nation’s cultural heritage. The way in which they display and interpret the treasures within them express how the past is seen and how the present and future areinterpreted. But it is in their public outreach to their visitors and audiences that have been traditionally excluded that they best express their mission, irrespective of the size or grandeur of their collections. The presentation will explore the evolving role of the museum as a major resource of community learning in particular for audiences that have in the past been excluded. It will highlight some of the inspiring ways in which museums in the UK and Japan have reached out to such audiences centering on initiatives aimed at audiences, with visual impairments and learning disabilities.

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