Revising modern divisions between blindness and sightedness: Doing knowledge in blind assemblages

Abstract

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.