“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.