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Hope academics release book exploring blindness

Professor David Bolt delivers inaugural lecture to audience

A new book exploring social attitudes to blindness has been released by Liverpool Hope University’s Centre for Culture and Disability Studies.

Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions examines blindness and what it means to be blind across a range of cultural settings, including education, politics, religion and literature.

It is edited by Professor David Bolt, Director of the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies in the School of Social Science.

The book is an interdisciplinary collaboration of academics working in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America, including Hope’s Dr Leah Burch and Dr David Feeney, who have both authored individual chapters.

Covering education, the humanities and the social sciences, Finding Blindness addresses a range of themes in its 16 chapters, with Professor Bolt and Dr Feeney both considering literary representations of blindness, whilst Dr Burch examines it in a social context.

Reflecting on the book’s release, Professor Bolt said:  “This edited volume is really important to me on many interrelated personal and professional levels.

“I have been registered as blind myself since my teenage years, so progress in understandings of blindness have a direct impact on me in that way.

“It is rewarding if not flattering that a handful of my own concepts have been applied and illustrated by colleagues from Hope, from elsewhere in the United Kingdom, and indeed from several continents of the world.”

Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions forms part of Autocritical Disability Studies, a series edited by Professor Bolt which emphasises autobiographical content and the lived experience of individuals alongside traditional academic material.

It is published by Routledge and available to buy now.


Published on 08/02/2023