Visual Hegemony and Divergent Disability Governance in China and the UK

• In Event: Governance, Digital Inequality, Service Accessibility, and Lived Experience

Abstract

This study investigates how visual normativity—the institutional privileging of sighted ways of knowing—operates as an underexamined form of epistemic governance in shaping disability policy, particularly in education and employment. By comparing China and the United Kingdom, the research explores how state frameworks reinforce, accommodate, or resist the dominant visual order, thereby structuring the opportunities and constraints faced by blind individuals.

In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 prohibits discrimination and, alongside the SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) framework, promotes inclusive education. Yet early findings suggest that visual literacy remains the implicit norm in educational assessment and employment qualification. Blind professionals often encounter “glass partitions,” where upward mobility is limited despite formal inclusion. In China, the Regulations on the Employment of Persons with Disabilities and the national quota policy mandate a 1.5% employment target, but implementation primarily reinforces occupational channeling into low-prestige, visibility-aligned sectors like massage therapy. The education system’s emphasis on “learning in regular classrooms”often fails to disrupt visual-normative curricula or pedagogies, leading to epistemic marginalization under the guise of integration.

The project employs semi-structured interviews with 30 blind participants across both countries, alongside document analysis of key policy texts, implementation plans, and international disability frameworks. Although data collection is still underway, emerging trends point to a shared governance logic: one that prioritizes inclusion through individualized accommodation while leaving the epistemic foundations of visual dominance unchallenged.

This research contributes to the fields of political sociology, disability policy, and comparative governance by reframing blindness not as a deficit to be corrected, but as a legitimate sensory orientation marginalized by visual hegemony. It calls for structural rethinking of integration, beyond access, to include the recognition and institutionalization of non-visual epistemologies. Through cross-national comparison, the study highlights both the universality and contextual specificity of sensory governance, offering theoretical and policy insights into how disability can be governed more justly in a multisensory world. In doing so, the study seeks not only to expand the epistemological foundations of disability policy, but also to advance a broader agenda of social equity—one that affirms multisensory ways of knowing as legitimate, valuable, and politically urgent.

Author

• junzhe gu, University College London
  Presenting Author