Rod Michalko “Blindness Meets the Devil” & Devon Healey “The Feel of Blindness”

Videography lee williams boudakian

Rod Michalko – “Blindness Meets the Devil” &
Devon Healey – “The Feel of Blindness”

January 29, 2019 | 4:00-5:00pm

Venue: The Sensorium Loft
4th Floor of the Joan and Martin Goldfarb Centre for Fine Art at York University

We are excited to announce the second event in the Peripheral Visions: Critical Disability Arts Perspectives on Vision, a series of public talks, conversations and masterclasses. Join us next week as Peripheral Vision Lab, Sensorium and VISTA welcome Rod Michalko and Devon Healey for an engaging afternoon of public talks. Rod Michalko will be presenting “Blindness Meets the Devil” a paper which explores blindness and how it meets itself, Devon Healey will be presenting “The Feel of Blindness” a paper which examines the feeling of difference in the body which illuminates blindness.

Rod Michalko (University of Toronto Emeritus) has taught sociology and disability studies in several Canadian Universities including, most recently, the University of Toronto.  He is author of numerous articles and books including The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness (UTP 1998), The Two in One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness (Temple UP, 1999) and The Difference that Disability Makes (Temple UP, 2002).  He is co-editor with Tanya Titchkosky of Rethinking Normalcy: A Disability Studies Reader (Scholars Press, 2009).  Since retirement, Rod has turned to writing fiction.  His first collection of short stories Things are Different Here (Insomniac Press) was published in 2017. He is currently completing his first novel, My Thick Persian Rug.  All of his work, scholarly and fiction, begins in his experience of blindness. Rod reveals how blindness may be understood as framing the scenes and activities of everyday life.

Devon Healey (OISE) is a blind PhD Candidate, award winning actor and active member in the Toronto arts community working with directors such as Guillermo del Toro on ‘The Strain.’ Her work explores how blindness makes an appearance in culture and is informed by disability studies, phenomenology and Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical model.  Her most recent article, “Eyeing the Pedagogy of Trouble: The Cultural Documentation of the Problem Subject” can be found in the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies.