Blindness Arts: Special Issue of Disability Studies Quarterly

We are delighted and proud to announce that a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly entitled 'Blindness Arts' is now available here. This issue - which is co-edited by Blind Creations organisers Hannah Thompson and Vanessa Warne - features work by several conference speakers and attendees. It continues collaborations and conversations which started at Blind Creations and is a wonderful way of extending the reach and legacy of the 2015 event.

Table of Contents (with links to articles)

Hannah Thompson and Vanessa Warne, “Blindness Arts: An Introduction”

Access

Fayen d’Evie and Georgina Kleege, “The Gravity, The Levity: Let Us Speak of TactileEncounters”

Hannah Thompson, “Audio Description: Turning Access to Film into Cinema Art”

Louise Fryer, “Staging the Audio Describer:  AnExploration of Integrated Audio Description”

Brandon Christopher, “Rethinking Comics and Visuality, from the Audio Daredevil to Philipp Meyer’s Life”

Creation

Aaron McPeake, “Bell Bronzes: Reflections on a Blind Visual Arts Practice”

Florian Grond and David Johnson, “Remote Feelings: On Blind-SightedCollaborations and Long-Distance Art Making”

Vanessa Warne, “Ready-Made Code: Braille in Contemporary Visual Culture”

Catalin Brylla, “Bypassing the Supercrip Trope in Documentary Representations of BlindVisual Artists”

Heather Tilley, “Portraying Blindness: Nineteenth-Century Images of Tactile Reading”

Performance

Piet Devos, “Dancing Beyond Sight: How Blindness Shakes up the Senses of Dance”

Arseli Dokumaci, “Disability as Method: Interventions in the Habitus of Ableismthrough Media-Creation”

Emily Michael, “Sacred Positions: A Personal History of Blindness and Singing”

Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky, "Travelling Blind"

Research News from Conference Delegates

We are pleased to share some Blind-Creations-related news from delegates:

Virginia Kastrup and her team have published an article that reports on a computer game which uses tactile radar to improve accessibility. More details can be found here.

On September 16, 2017, Aravinda Bhat moderated a panel discussionn entitled "Understanding Blindness in Literature" as part of the annual Manipal International Literature and Arts Platform (m.i.l.a.p.). Listen to sessions from the festival here.

We would also like to warmly congratulate Aravinda successfully defending his PhD thesis: "Corporeal Refractions: Narrativising the Visually Impaired Subject in Selected Writings by Jorge Luis Borges, John Hull, and Stephen Kuusisto" in September. Congratulations DR Bhat!

Research seminar in Paris

Blind Creations speaker Anne-Lise Mitout is organizing a research workshop on "Blind People and Music: a Franco-Japanese perspective" that will take place on October 18th at the Université Paris-Diderot. It will feature a presentation by Professor Hiromi Hyôdô (Gakushûin University, Tokyo) who is a specialist of blind musicians in medieval Japan, and another by another Blind Creations delegate Sébastien Durand. Contact Anne-Lise Mitout for more information and to register. 

Exhibition on 'Les Deux Orphelines' opens in Montreal

[Cliquez ici pour un billet en français sur l'expo]

Delegates and post-conference listeners who enjoyed Bérengère Levet's talk on nineteenth-century French melodrama Les deux orphelines (The Two Orphan Girls) at Blind Creations (listen again via our audio archive), will be interested to learn that Levet has curated an exhibition about the work which is showing at the University of Montreal until October 20th. (Practical details here). 

The tale of the two orphan sisters - one sighted, the other blind - has been retold and re-imagined in astonishing ways since its first performance in 1874. The exhibition explores the history of the work, the representations of blindness it has led to and its place in the genre of the popular melodrama more widely through more than 60 items (including first editions, postcards, drawings and other documents) as well as film clips and a 'reading corner'. 

For those not able to visit the exhibition in person, Levet has also provided links to some fascinating online resources:

A song from the melodrama:
Doru Monteanu sings "Ô ma tendre Musette" (2012)

An extract from the audio book (in French):

Les Deux orphelines by Adolphe d’Ennery (Part 4, chapter 1) (2012)

An English language adaptation:

The Two Orphans by d’Ennery & Corman (1987)

Two comic songs (in French) which mention Les deux orphelines:

Raymond Lévesque, accompanied by the Emil Stern trio, sings "Les deux orphelines" (1956)

Pierre Perret sings "Le zizi ou L’éducation sexuelle à l’école" (1975)

Extracts and images from a modern French musical adaptation:    

Amour, rapt et méchancetés: "un drame à rire, une comédie à pleurer" (2016) 

Our second anniversary letter

Dear Blind Creations speakers and delegates,

On this, the second anniversary of Blind Creations, we would like to thank you once more for your contribution to the conference and its legacy. Many of you continue to work on projects related to the conference themes and we are delighted to see how many new projects and collaborations have emerged from it. We always love hearing about ongoing work so please do remember to keep us up-to-date with your projects. This conference website is still live (but quiet) and we are always happy to advertise new books, conferences and events on it. Please send any announcements to Hannah. We have enjoyed speaking about the conference at events in Boston and Montreal over the past 18 months and are working on a Disability Studies Quarterly(DSQ) special issue featuring several of our speakers based on themes from the conference. More news on that, and the French special issue of theRevue canadienne des études sur le handicapwhich Hannah is co-editing with Maria Arentsen, will be coming in 2018.

We wish you all a happy and productive summer and looking forward to hearing your news.

With warm wishes,

Hannah and Vanessa

Dr Hannah Thompson
Reader in French, Royal Holloway University of London

Vanessa Warne, Associate Professor 

English, Film and Theatre, University of Manitoba

Audio Description: The Art of Access: Podcasts Now Live

Many thanks to all the speakers and participants who made our workshop on Audio Description on October 21st, 2016, such a success! We are confident that many conversations and collaborations will continue. In the meantime, thanks to our sponsors Royal Holloway, podcasts of all the day's talks (and a few described photographs) are available here.

Jacques Lusseyran Colloquium: recordings available

Video recordings of all the papers at the Jacques Lusseyran Colloquium which was held in Pairs on June 28 2016 can now be accessed by following this link.