Please join us on Thursday, 10th April, 2025, for a talk hosted by the Centre of Health, Humanities and Science (CHHS).
Disabilities and the ‘Radical Enlightenment’: Health, Literacy, and the Democratization of the Senses
In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault identifies two great mythical experiences of the eighteenth century upon which philosophy had placed its beginnings, "the foreign spectator in an unknown country, and the man born blind restored to light". Quite apart from the boundless curiosity by the public, the scientific community, and the philosophes in literally and figuratively seeing anew, the eighteenth century also brought forth large institutes and educational projects around literacy, learning, and the use of signs for those with disabilities, including the Abbé Charles-Michel de L’Epée and his National Institute for Deaf Youth in 1755, and Valentin Haüy's Royal Institute for Blind Youth in 1784. In this talk I consider the growing power of key thinkers and European state institutions in the production of a certain form of healthful liberal subjectivity, and how Enlightenment values shaped attitudes to ‘blindness’, disability, and the democratization of the senses well into the twentieth century.
Speaker:
Mark Paterson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. His most recent book is Affective Touching: Neurobiology and Technological Applications in the Cambridge University Press ‘Element’ series. His other books include The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (2007), Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (2016), and How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation (2021). He is on the Editorial Board of the journals The Senses and Society (since 2008), Emotion, Space and Society (2014-2024), and Multimodality & Society (since 2021). His research website is http://sensory-motor.com.