Speaker Series

Vision has held a privileged status as a primary way to know and engage in the world in western modernity. Today, more than ever, the importance of vision to human knowledge, health and action seems self-evident, as we experience incredible expansion in technologies of biological and digital vision in arts, medicine, science, governance, war, and everyday life. Yet vision is about far more than a biological or technologically enhanced capacity to see. Vision is interconnected with other senses and modes of perception and it is situated in specific bodies, material-historical contexts and structures of power.

Running from January 2019 to March 2019, the Peripheral Vision Speaker Series presented scholars/artists working within critical disability and Indigenous frameworks to address vision, blind epistemology and art, crip technoscience, and Indigenous visioning practices. The series explored and critiqued the primacy of vision, problematizing the normalcy of ‘perfect’ vision, and worked to innovate blind and multi-sensory ways of knowing.

Curated by Mary Bunch, Laura Levin and Lauren Sergio the Peripheral Vision Speaker Series was hosted by York University’s Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology in the School of Art, Media, Performance and Design. The series was sponsored by SSHRC, CREF, VISTA -Vision: Science to Applications, The Departments of Theatre and Cinema and Media Arts, the Performance Studies (Canada) Speaker Series and the Graduate Program in Critical Disability Studies. Other partners included Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life, Tangled Art + Disability, and the New College Disability Studies Speaker Series at the University of Toronto.