Accessing the arts: Innovating audience feedback methods for neurodivergent and disabled audiences

This project is based on a research partnership between the CERC Health Equity and Community Wellbeing and Xenia Concerts. Xenia concerts provide family-friendly, accessible programming to the broader neurodiversity community, the disability community (including Deaf-friendly performances with musical ASL), the dementia community, and older adults with low income. The partnership involves the CERC hiring a student intern through TMU to work for Xenia for 3 months to support the organization with their internal research. As part of a broad investigation into the social factors that affect health and wellbeing, this student internship aims to explore access to the arts in the contexts of disability and neurodiversity. The student will support Xenia concerts in researching the design and evaluation of accessible concerts. Supervised by the CERC’s postdoctoral fellow in arts, healing and wellbeing, the student intern will explore the relationship between the work of Xenia and health equity for intersectional disability communities. The aims are to improve programming and sharing insights with artists and arts organizations to improve accessibility more widely. Relatedly, they will conduct evidence-based literature reviews to inform future research in the aforementioned arenas. This will include researching methods for engaging people with various forms of disability in providing feedback. This background research will aid Xenia in developing new forms of audience surveys for diverse audiences. It will also assist in developing research questions related to Adaptive Concerts and accessible arts programming for future and broader research.

As Ontario and other regions work towards improving accessibility, this research will aid Xenia and similar organizations in improving their accessibility in line with legislation like AODA. Furthermore, with increasing recognition of the importance of arts for individual and community health and wellbeing, this research will provide insight into ways that arts can become more accessible to disabled and neurodiverse communities who are often marginalized. The research is framed by moves towards open access ‘as a creative, long-term process’ of ‘embodied learning’ (Papalia, 2018), focusing on increasing the agency of marginalized people; important for wellbeing. Because the audiences served by Xenia and others offering adaptive concerts may not find traditional paper/online text-based surveys accessible (Wilson et al, 2013), it is important to explore new methods to gather audience feedback so that future adaptive concerts and related research can be guided by those with lived experience of disabled and neurodiverse people (Jones et al, 2021).