Paper short abstract:

This paper describes and reflects upon the work of the accessibility subcommittee of the Brazilian Anthropological Association in creating solutions for the cultural and artistic exhibitions that were part of the Association’s first virtual meeting.

Paper long abstract:

In the face of Covid-19 pandemic, the Brazilian Anthropological Association had to move their biannual meeting to a virtual environment. This is a major event for Brazilian anthropology It gathers thousands of people to attend a wide variety of paper sessions, roundtable discussions, workshops, and cultural and artistic activities, such as photo exhibits and ethnographic film screenings. As part of the accessibility subcommittee, the authors of this paper faced the challenge of helping curators adapt the format of the meeting’s exhibits to this new reality. The subcommittee general’s approach to this task was to come up with creative strategies to promote aesthetic accessibility for people with disabilities, while enriching the overall experience for the public in general. With that in mind, we took the multiple corporeal experiences of people with disabilities not simply as impairments, but as invitations to develop to new forms of engagement with the exhibits’ materials. We propose a presentation for this panel in the form of a video that will be recorded and edited in advance, in an attempt to extend the aforementioned approach to the conference paper format itself, and re-create the experience of multiple sensorial engagements that we tried to evoke in the exhibitions.