New Term; New Techniques

This academic year I am teaching two new courses which I have specifically designed to include Critical Disability Studies content. My new final-year option 'Blindness and Vision in French Culture' will use a range of texts, films and images to interrogate the French obsession with vision and the visual and what this might tell us about what 'blindness' means. I am also co-teaching a new first-year course, 'Decoding France: Language, Culture, Identity' for which I have designed my section around Jean-Dominique Bauby's fascinating memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

The introduction of these new courses seems a perfect time to make my teaching experience - and my students' learning experience - more blindness-friendly. One of my greatest challenges as a teacher is recognising my students and distinguishing between them. I know all my students' names but I don't know their faces. So in the classroom I hardly ever know who I am talking to. My face blindness means that I sometimes do not even recognise people - like my husband or my children - whom I know extremely well. So I've been thinking about strategies to help me put names to faces in my classes.

I always ask my students to tell me their names before they speak in class, but this, like shouting out instead of hand-raising - is a difficult habit for them to get into. So this year I am going to sit my students in alphabetical order and ask them to keep the same seat in each class. This way I'll be able to work out who is absent and who is present by clocking empty chairs and I'll know which students to call on for answers. I'll also be able to use the position of their voices to match them with names and hopefully once I've made the voice-name connection, I'll start recognising them when they talk to me outside class.

My aim in thinking more proactively about how to manage my blindness in the classroom is not purely selfish. I also want my students to experience blindness as a creative way of being and doing rather than as a tragedy. I want them to study blindness in texts, but also to think about how their habits and assumptions unintentionally promote the kind of occularcentric world which I'd like my courses to critique.

Blind Creations conference - CFP issued

I am very excited to be co-organising the Blind Creations conference with Vanessa Warne (University of Manitoba, Canada). This three-day international conference, which will take place between 28 June and 30 June 2015, seeks to explore the relationship between blind people and artistic creation. Our definition of ‘blind person’ is broad, encompassing anyone who might be defined as having ‘non-normative vision’ and / or who relates to the world using senses other than sight. It welcomes interventions from blind and non-blind academics (with or without institutional affiliation), practitioners, advocates, writers and artists (also broadly defined to include musicians, dancers and sculptors as well as visual artists). It sees blind people not only as subjects in their own right, but also as active creators; as such it rejects the ‘medical model’ of disability which posits blind people as passive objects of medical investigation and rehabilitation. In so doing it hopes to challenge and reconceptualise the myths and stereotypes of ‘blindness’ which continue to circulate by recasting ‘blindness’ as a multi-faceted and positive creative force which might be usefully explored by both non-blind and blind people.

The conference will take place at Royal Holloway’s campus in Egham, Surrey, UK, We are pleased to announce that the conference will feature two plenary speakers: Prof Georgina Kleege (UC Berkeley) and Dr Zina Weygand (Paris). During the conference, we plan to host a number of cultural events, including a Blindness in Fiction Writers’ Roundtable (featuring novelist and poet, Naomi Foyle), a tactile museum tour, and an audio-described film screening.

The conference Call for Papers can be found here and more information about the speakers is available here.