Within and Beyond Sight: An Ethnography of People with Visual Impairment

In this presentation, I will share the findings of my research conducted over the past two years and a half with individuals who have visual disabilities. This research explores the lived experiences of people whose vision differs from what is expected. Each participant has developed unique strategies to navigate their differences and has expressed, with great emotion, their experiences in a world where sight often feels like the only sensation that matters.
This project is also a form of research-creation, incorporating auditory elements where you will hear the voices of the collaborators. Through their voices, we not only hear their emotions and hesitations, but also experience the environments in which I conducted the interviews. The voices, along with the rawness of the auditory segments, allow us to understand the situation beyond just words.
Thus, my work challenges traditional ways of sharing and understanding knowledge. Sensory experiences are not always tangible or objective in the way we typically value knowledge, but my research aims to create space for these forms of experience within the academic world.
Keywords: Ethnography, Vision, Sensation, Experience, Audio

Brígida Cristina Maestres Useche ∆ (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain)

The Animism of the Wandering Eye

For those who remain concerned with the problem of knowledge and experience and with its political effects, this presentation shows the path followed by Brígida Maestres and Angela Bonadies in their attempt to positively describe (low) visual experience. How did we grasp my own visual experience overcoming the embodied narratives of visual impairment? It shows how an aesthetic experience contributed ecstatically and creatively in both, loosening, liberating, merging -densifying- the cognitive and poetic frameworks; generating aesthetic materials that can, at the same time, break epistemologically with the duality disability/normality; (re)introducing aesthetically the beauty of a peripheral world already detached from the referents of the lack. This is the animist world.
Keywords: low vision, phenomenology, biopolitics, critical disability, art and science

Mary Sherman ∆ (TransCultural Exchange, Boston, USA)

The Hidden World of Visuals, or Unpacking What We See to Understand the Multi-Sensory Connections Our Eyes Make

Seeing includes our brains making hundreds of calculations, comparisons and connections with our other senses (typically, unbeknownst to us) to supplement what our eyes tell us. This act is what causes the often-heard refrain from people when they see a picture they like, “I don’t know. I just like it.” But, if we slow the viewing process down, some of what caused our hypothetical art enthusiast’s reaction can be explained. For example, for a drawing class I teach in Boston, I ask the students to describe what three different educational institutions look like: Harvard College, Northeastern University and, their college Boston College. In doing so, the students discover that the look of these institutions’ campuses (their buildings, location, grounds, etc.) perfectly match each institution’s mission – something we might not notice when we step foot on them, but our subconscious does and, consequently, all three schools have a high retention rate. My paper, which can also be run as a workshop, will start with this same exercise followed by the examination of key art historical paintings to show, for instance, how Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night magnificently creates a sense of unease and Edward Hopper’s paintings convey a sense of hopeless.
Keywords: artworks, visuals, multi-sensory, education, seeing