sense and sensibility: Social-spatial experiences of the visually-impaired in Singapore

Vision plays an important role in our daily life, and geography is to a large extent, a visual discipline. The persistence of the visual ideology is problematic as it encourages geographical scholarship to neglect the role of non-visual senses while at the same time, marginalises the experiences of non-sighted people. By adopting an interpretative approach and drawing concepts from "sensuous geographies", this paper explores the role of non-visual senses in the spatial experiences of the visually-impaired in Singapore. Through humanistic inquiry, the paper also examines some of the problems that the visually-impaired in Singapore encounter in public spaces and social interaction. To this end, the author aims to illumine the intricate relationship between our non-visual senses and social sensibility when thinking about sightlessness.