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This article focuses on the organization of space. The practices through which we grasp and conceive space are the paper’s concern. Practices emanating from the visual organization of space are usually so commonplace for seeing people so that these practices are only poorly reflected in seeing people’s understandings of space. This is why we turn to the experience of visually impaired people. Our understanding of this experience is based on interviews with 16 communication partners from Prague and Brno in 2014 and 2015. We use the poststructuralist approach of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, psychoanalyst Félix Guattari and geographer Marcus Doel to interpret the interviews and we show that visual impairment is not about non-seeing, but about becoming seeing differently – via the non-visual percept. Yet, such practices of seeing space differently are still shaped by the modern collective optical unconscious. Doel asserts that this unconscious has been structured by the medium of film, among others, and the film technique of montage. This has made the optical unconscious obscene. Montage unbound time and space from their firm coordinates and enabled seeing beyond screened frames. This strengthened the incorporeality of spatial experience. Visually impaired people’s practices of seeing and dealing with the optical unconscious accentuate the corporeality of sight again, however. Their practices fuse the seeing via non-visual percept and the optical unconscious into new configurations, demonstrating that no way of seeing can be incorporeal.

The point of departure of the article is distant suffering studies. The article tries to supplement them by theses from post-colonial and critical spatial theories that were elaborated in post-colonial geography. Through post-colonial imaginative geographies, the spatial context shapes Western television performances of wartime suffering. This is demonstrated by empirical examples of mediation of wars in Mali, Palestine and Syria, from the news of Czech Television. In the Malian case, the space is homogenized as a violent African space, where suffering is moral. In the Palestinian case, the space is divided into rational Israeli and barbaric Palestinian space, where Palestinians’ suffering is neglected, if Israel stays evidently rational. In the Syrian case, the suffering is accented, however, only if Syrians seem to want to de-Orientalize themselves. These cases demonstrate that there is always a need to be spatially sensitive in respect to mediated distant suffering from post-colonial regions.

The book Geography of Barriers: Examples of Good Barrier-free Practice offers a collection of texts that are interested in making space, services, and information accessible. Thus, the collection is primarily about barriers, their nature, localization, and possible effects. Under barriers, most people imagine material barriers for wheelchair users in the form of steps or sidewalk curbs. Only a few would think that barriers can be represented by loosely placed rugs, unfit lighting, large glass surface, a doorbell without visual output, unwanted attention, frequent asking and offering help, lack of language knowledge, pity, etc. Thus, the book broadens awareness of what can be considered a barrier. The texts are divided into three parts – theoretical, methodic, and empirical – and their arrangement follows the logic of thematic focusing from the most general to the most concrete types of barriers. While the theoretical part places the policies of accessibility into the wider context of scientific disciplines and their development – such as disability studies, disability geography or service design, the methodic part discusses the introduction of accessibility policies in the city of Brno, describing how it tried to make its space, services, and information more accessible. Finally, the empirical part offers 18 examples of relatively good barrier-free implementations that have been recently realized in Brno. This division reflects an effort to target several groups of readers. The first part thus addresses mainly students interested in accessibility issues, the second, methodic part is intended for politicians and municipalities searching for inspiration to implement their own accessibility measures and policies. The last part stating concrete examples of good barrier-free implementations is aimed at general public, at people who like to think about a whole range of topics related to accessibility of space, services, and information.