This article examines the everyday experience of visually disabled people with norms and normality and confronts it with three approaches discussed in disability studies: (i) the medical model, (ii) the social model, and (iii) critical disability studies. The most available model to the people in the study, as well as the most widespread approach in Czech society, is the medical model. However, the text shows that although other approaches are rather marginal, their logic is present in the everyday experience of the communication partners in the research. They can espouse the rigid, medical model, while, at the same time, confronting the construction of norms that both the social model and critical disability studies defy. This finding reveals both the normative and subversive character of disability, manifested in visually impaired experience.
Western society associates knowledge with vision while affiliating blindness with ignorance. Following critical disability studies and drawing upon non-structured interview data and ethnographic observations with visually disabled people, the article opposes this idea by examining how blind assemblages construct knowledge and highlight its heterogeneous and dynamic character, usually obscured by visual shortcuts. After discussing how the research participants encounter discourses devaluating knowledge not based primarily on vision, the article focuses on divisive practices that lead to the construction of dis/ability and ab/normality, and how they can be revised by conceiving knowledge, senses and dis/ability as assemblages. The heterogeneous and dynamic character of knowledge, which the text argues for, defies perceiving blindness as a deficit and blurs the divisions between the self and the other as well as the sighted and the blind since knowledge is produced collectively.
The first chapter of the book has multiple goals. It introduces the topics and the chosen title Geography of Barriers and discusses why it is important to study it. It shows how the above-mentioned accessibility of space, services and information depends on various types of barriers. Their influence on policies of accessibility in public space frames the whole book. Thinking about barriers is not limited to the dimension of streets or squares, but considers the broader meaning of barriers: in public buildings, institutions, services, websites, information systems, applications, etc. A barrier does not have to be material, it can be of social, communication, or technological nature. Our book distinguishes among three types of barriers. The first type is represented by those annoying material high curbs, missing guide, unlabeled earthwork, etc. – i.e., the barriers of our everyday life. When talking about examples of removing the first type of barriers, we already consider the second type – so-called political barriers one encounters in the introduction of policies of accessibility. The last type of barriers is devoted only peripheral attention, being represented by so-called post-socialist barriers, i.e., barriers stemming from the meaning of disability in a post-socialist society. All three types of barriers and their implications for establishing policies of accessibility in the Czech Republic are gradually introduced. This chapter also outlines the following chapters, their authors and their diverse approaches to disability. It offers a guide to the whole book, its structure, the language it uses, and explains various highlights and frames, inviting the readers to open the volume.
The second chapter talks about the development of disability studies and its key points such as the intersection of activism and academia, the social model of disability, or interconnection of various disciplines. The ways of thinking about ability, disability, normal and abnormal bodies and people, are highly formed by the society – by education, media, expert and lay discourses ranging from medicine to social policy – and influence how cities, streets and houses are designed. Therefore, the aim of disability studies is to change the discourses and modes of behavior so that they are more inclusive. The chapter discusses beginnings of this field at the interconnections of activism and academia, and its difficult position in the Czech Republic, where it is not an established major at any university. Here, especially the public discourse revolves around the medical model of disability that sees the core of the problem in one’s impairment, instead of focusing on disabling processes leading to discrimination, which the social model of disability, pivotal for disability studies, does. However, the chapter also discusses various critiques of the social model. It tends to unify disability and thus overlooks individual differences, as well as differences between diverse regions. As a reaction to these critiques, critical disability studies were established at the beginning of 21st century. They raise questions about relevance of some older concepts and premises of disability studies in the postmodern world and late capitalism. Critical disability studies challenge the very differentiation between normality and abnormality and at the related binaries on which disability is built. Departing from the humanist perspective of the social model, CDS adopt a posthumanist perspective abandoning the notion of an independent, autonomous, Subject. They focus on interconnectivity of the social and the material, the human and the nonhuman, the organic and the inorganic. Instead of the “capability and usability of the body,” critical disability studies ask about the meanings of “ability and disability.”
This article thematizes relations between visual impairment and urban space, drawing from the analytical perspective of actor-network theory (ANT). It traces the ways in which visually impaired people create specific connections with space and how they transform it. Urban space is configured for use by able-bodied persons, for whom movement within it is easy and seems to be disembodied. However, for those who defy the standardization of space, the materiality of movement is constantly present and visible, because the passages are difficult to make and are not ready in advance. These materialities, as well as the strategies that people use to make connections with urban space, differ according to the assemblages that visually impaired people create. A route is different with a cane, a human companion, a guide dog, or the use of a combination of such assistance; the visually impaired person pays attention to different clues, follows specific lines, and other information is important and available. Each configuration makes it possible or impossible to do something; this shows disability as dynamic, and demonstrates the collective nature of action, which is more visible and palpable in the case of a disabled person.
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