Museum AD: A Transdisciplinary Encounter

This paper first gives an overview of AD in relation to accessibility. Accessibility and transdisciplinarity have in fact become the key notions around which AD has developed in recent times. Accessibility is now seen not only as a means of overcoming physical, emotional, intellectual and sensory barriers but also as a proactive principle of Human Rights. Transdisciplinarity is here meant as a dialogue among disciplines bringing about changes in each of them. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed account of the complex relationship of museum AD with museum studies and visual culture. In fact, museum AD is an example of a successful transdisciplinary encounter: focussing on some features of museum AD, such as language and accessibility, a parallel is drawn between the development of museums and that of museum AD. Particularly significant for museum AD was the passage from the postmodern museum to the ‘post-museum’, which revises some founding tenets of museology such as elitism, nation, community, education, distinction between high art and low art and predominance of ‘seeing’ over the other senses. For this reason, an extensive bibliography on AD, museum studies and visual culture covering the main achievement in each field is given. My aim is to offer a reference based guide for those scholars interested in the on-going transdisciplinary debate among these disciplines.