Blind on the Road: A Sensory History of Urban Walking and Automobility
Robert Stock
Abstract
Blind on the Road provides an analysis of the modern history of blind techniques for orientation and mobility with a focus on the long cane, electronic travel aids, and the changes of blind mobility in times of digital media and connected driving. As such, this book highlights the experiences and voices of blind technology users to demonstrate how blind people are full participants in urban traffic and mobility arrangements. By concentrating on developments in the second half of the twentieth century, with a focus on the US and Germany, the book explores bodily and sensory techniques, mobility concepts, as well as key assistive devices supporting interdependent movement in often inaccessible urban environments. Using a historical and qualitative approach and drawing on the history of science and knowledge, disability history, and disability media studies, this book maps the complex relationships between the senses, assistive devices, and mobility regimes including electric a nd autonomous mobility which shape the everyday experiences of blind people. Demonstrating how knowledges, material objects and mobility concepts of blindness become mobile, this book places blind people at the centre of urban modernity, rather than focusing on their exclusion. It presents a fresh view on disability history and the intersection of the history of knowledge, science and technology, and material culture. By considering disabling and marginalizing practices of blind pedestrianism in historical and current settings, it also presents a thorough consideration of an exemplary case of how unjust mobility configurations are negotiated.
