Paper short abstract:

How do blind and visually impaired people embody a remarkable way of being-in-the-world? What distinct sensory modes of perception are used to navigate, communicate, and lend care? And, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, how does this lifeworld endeavour under the hegemonic framework of risk?

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I draw upon my ethnographic fieldwork with blind and visually impaired people in the UK categorised as high-risk during the Covid-19 pandemic. More specifically, I take a phenomenological approach to explore how blind and visually impaired people embody a remarkable way of being-in-the-world: utilising distinct sensory modes of perception, fashioned by the interplay of the body with its surroundings in everyday contexts (Csordas,1990). This perceptual distinctiveness was most notable in a context which challenged its deep subjectivity: where tactile navigation and affection were scrutinised under hegemonic framework of risks.

For my blind and visually impaired collaborators, tactile perception became a taboo and 'dangerous' means of being-in-the-world, resulting in their physical separatism and isolation from wider, sighted society. I argue that calculated risk has the power to reframe, hierarchically position and naturalise sensorial ways of knowing, giving primacy to ocular-centric somatic norms. Significantly, the objectification of proxemics and touch as risk objects politicised the way that visually impaired people negotiate their everyday lives via the utility of their bodies, and how they mediate, interpret and interact with their physical and social contexts.