“Sense and Sensibility”: Social‐spatial Experiences of the Visually‐impaired in Singapore

Abstract

Vision plays an important role in our daily life, and geography is to a large extent, a visual discipline. The persistence of the visual ideology is problematic as it encourages geographical scholarship to neglect the role of non-visual senses while at the same time, marginalises the experiences of non-sighted people. By adopting an interpretative approach and drawing concepts from "sensuous geographies", this paper explores the role of non-visual senses in the spatial experiences of the visually-impaired in Singapore. Through humanistic inquiry, the paper also examines some of the problems that the visually-impaired in Singapore encounter in public spaces and social interaction. To this end, the author aims to illumine the intricate relationship between our non-visual senses and social sensibility when thinking about sightlessness.

Cycling the City: Movement, Meaning and Method

“…In an urban context, these problems are intensified due to the impossibility of talking to cyclists while they are riding in traffic or performing movements that require intense concentration. Moreover, in order to communicate meaning, experiences must at some point be represented in one form or other, and as Pow (2000) goes on to explain, it is often difficult for people to express their experience of senses other than vision due to the limited vocabularies associated with non‐visual dimensions (2000, 169, see also Jarvinen 2006). Compounding this problem is the fact that many sensations such as balance and touch are often fleeting and hidden moments of existence which do not lend themselves to expression or capture in the same ways as the visual or aural.…”

Visual Impairment in the City: Young People’s Social Strategies for Independent Mobility

“…The second strand of research is interested in the social experience of being visually impaired in public space (Hill, 1985;Cook, 1991;Butler, 1994Butler, , 1998Butler and Bowlby, 1997;Pow, 2000;Allen, 2004aAllen, , 2004bMacpherson, 2007). Early work used phenomenology to understand the experience of blindness (Hill, 1985;Cook, 1991).…”

Do social meanings matter? How and how much social meanings influence everyday transport practices?

“…This approach has some limitations. Participants may not be fully aware of influences on their practices, they may find influences difficult to express, and they may be guided in what they express by their knowledge of the aims of the research (Bourdieu ; Pow ; Kusenbach ; Latham ; Pile ; Spinney ; Vergunst ; Hitchings ; Merriman ). There is evidence that methods allowing participants time to reflect on their practices – as do the methods used in this research – can mitigate some of these concerns (Latham ; Hitchings ; Fitt, forthcoming).…”