Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology and the Body-in-Space Encounters of Visually Impaired Children

In this paper I argue that new social geographies of impairment present a conceptually sophisticated, but limiting, view of the impaired body as a container of social disadvantage. They say much less about how people with impairments routinely exercise agency in everyday life vis-à-vis the restrictive sociospatial circumstances in which they find themselves. I address this problem by developing a phenomenology of visually impaired children's everyday body-in-space encounters with their home and urban environments. This illustrates the various and creative ways in which visually impaired children routinely exercise agency within their home and urban environments.