Wellbeing for the Blind and Visually Impaired: An Arts-Based Cripistemological Ethnography of Alexandria, Egypt's Taha Hussein Library.

Abstract

As an arts-based cripistemological communication study, we consider how the blind and visually impaired (BVI) manifest wellbeing through sensorial acuities that draw from contextual capacity, affective ranges, and polyvalent meanings through multi-modal offerings. We specifically home in on a context developed for the BVI; that is, the Taha Hussein for the Visually Impaired library (THL), a wing of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) located in Alexandria, Egypt. The BA mission is twofold: to be a center that disseminates knowledge and to be a place of dialogue. Understanding the THL as an institution created through communication practice within a local Islamic culture, we interpret those BVI discursive practices through a cripistemological framework and offer our findings as an arts-based ethnographic communication study. Crip theory rejects comparisons to the able-bodied and seeks to comprehend disability through its agentic possibilities. We present these possibilities via three textual art forms that promote BVI sensorial acuities as exemplars of wellbeing. These exemplars are expressed as passages of opacity. The three passages of opacity include opacities of the contextualized individual, opacities of collective joy, and opacities of polyvalent modalities. These aesthetically cued, evocatively presented opacities demonstrate how BVI positionality and local Islamic context overlap to inspire BVI wellbeing that could arguably be practiced by all.