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Accepted Paper:

The Sense of Snow: Visual disability enacted in urban space  
Helena Leino (University of Tampere)

Paper short abstract:

We focus on the enactment of visual disability in urban space. Our data consists of walking interviews with visually impaired people. We illustrate the multiple ways in which visually disabled people sense the city and how they interact with other dwellers and material elements in urban space.

Paper long abstract:

Cities enable and offer but also close and limit the ways in which the urban space is being used. In our paper, we focus on analyzing how visually disabled persons experience the urban environment in their everyday lives. The urban space includes stairs, cobblestones, railings, pedestrian crossings, bicycles, terraces, roadworks and so on. These material elements enact in interaction with urban dwellers. Simultaneously the elements either create possibilities or restrictions to use the city. Our goal is to break down the enactment of visual disability in urban space when walking in the city centre and interacting with the socio-material practices of urban space (Moser 2005, Galis 2011). Our data has been gathered via walking interviews (Ingold & Vergunst 2008) with visually impaired people in Finland. The data collection has offered a rich diversity of ways to sense the city. Our research illustrates the multiple ways in which visually disabled people interact with other dwellers and material elements they encounter in their daily activities. In the latter part of the paper we discuss the enactment of disability and how despite the overlapping enactments of experiencing the urban space the emphasis is often given to the visual observation. The analysis combines the perspectives of science and technology studies (STS) and urban studies.

Panel T004
STS and Planning: Research and practice intervening in a material world
  Session 1 Friday 2 September, 2016, -