SENSEMUSE: Building an Inclusive Future for Europe’s Museums

When the SENSEMUSE project set out to reimagine how museums and cultural institutions serve vulnerable audiences, the ambition was never just institutional reform — it was a question of who gets to be moved by heritage, and who gets left outside the room. This month, that question found 213 answers. The project’s stakeholder network has now reached 213 people and institutions across Europe, each one choosing to rethink inclusion not as an afterthought to cultural programming, but as its foundation.

From Theory to Practice

SENSEMUSE — formally “Strengthening Cooperation to Establish a Novel Service Blueprint for Vulnerable Audiences in Museums and Collections,” funded under Erasmus+ Adult Education — has always rested on a simple but demanding premise: heritage institutions that inform are not the same as heritage institutions that include. The distinction matters most for audiences too often designed around rather than for — people with disabilities, the hard of hearing, visitors facing mobility barriers.

That premise was put into practice this September, when the project’s first Master Class brought together 35 participants across four online sessions in cultural communication. The sessions were deliberately grounded rather than aspirational: the Faro Convention’s insistence on heritage as a matter of values and human relationships rather than nationalism; UNESCO’s criteria for assessing significance; the hard case studies — restored monuments in Rhodes that visitors still can’t access, the fractured public consensus revealed by opinion polling on Hiroshima — that show what happens when meaning isn’t communicated, only preserved. Participants worked through a values exercise built on a genuine moral dilemma, discovering firsthand how differently people read the same heritage depending on where they stand.

The session closed with what might be its most important idea: that interpretation, done well, doesn’t just relay facts — it creates what philosopher John Dewey called a transformative experience. Aristotle, invoked as the father of interpretation itself, set the bar even earlier: meaning has to meet the visitor’s own horizon before it can move them anywhere else.

What 213 Actually Means

Numbers like this can flatten into vanity metrics if we let them. But a stakeholder network at this scale, for a project still in its early training cycle, says something concrete: institutions and practitioners across the partnership’s reach — Romania, Greece, and beyond — are actively choosing to build accessible cultural experience into their practice now, not waiting for it to become a compliance requirement later. Thirty-five of those stakeholders already hold a Certificate of Attendance for the first Master Class; the rest represent a growing circle of museums, consultancies, and cultural professionals watching, and in many cases preparing to join directly.

What Comes Next

The project’s next milestone is already on the calendar: an Intensive Training Program in Accessible Culture this November, built specifically around adapting interpretive practice for people with disabilities — moving the project’s core commitment from framework to method.

213 stakeholders is a number worth marking. It’s also, more usefully, a measure of momentum — proof that a project built on the unglamorous work of service blueprints and interpretive frameworks can still gather a community around it. If your institution is rethinking who your heritage is actually for, this is a good moment to find out where SENSEMUSE stands, and where it’s headed next.

SENSEMUSE is funded under Erasmus+ Adult Education (Grant 2025-1-IT02-KA210-ADU-000355252), led by TECNOCONSULTING. Interpretive content and research: Dr. Dorothea Papathanasiou-Zuhrt, CULTINVEST.