Governed by Sight: Visual Hegemony and the Politics of Knowledge in Comparative Perspective

• In Event: 40825 - Disability, Work and Economies of Difference

Abstract

This presentation examines visual hegemony as a transnational structure of epistemic governance—one that shapes how knowledge is defined, legitimized, and distributed. Rather than viewing blindness through the lens of sensory deficit or accommodation, this project reframes it as an epistemic divergence rendered illegible by institutions that center visual modes of knowing. Visual hegemony operates not only through symbolic representations but through systemic mechanisms that define professional competence, educational achievement, and cognitive legitimacy in terms of visual engagement. Despite expanding commitments to accessibility and inclusion, most disability policies remain anchored in technocratic reforms, leaving untouched the foundational question: who determines the standards of valid knowledge, and by what means?

Methodologically, this study adopts a comparative qualitative design, combining semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and critical policy analysis in China and the UK. Interviews include blind individuals as well as institutional actors in education and policy domains. In China, the project will also involve short-term ethnographic fieldwork at a school for blind students. Preliminary findings indicate three major patterns: first, both systems reproduce visual hegemony within educational and occupational structures, despite different ideological frameworks; second, many participants express internalized visual hierarchies, often devaluing non-visual forms of literacy; third, while policy rhetoric increasingly emphasizes inclusion, underlying knowledge economies remain structured by the visual logics that marginalize blind epistemologies.

Theoretically, this project contributes to debates on epistemic justice, symbolic power, and the political sociology of knowledge. It situates blindness not at the margins of social life, but at the center of struggles over who gets to define, circulate, and embody authoritative knowledge. Ultimately, this research invites a shift from inclusive policy to epistemic transformation—asking not how to adapt individuals to knowledge systems, but how to reconstruct those systems to honor the full spectrum of human ways of knowing.

Author

• Junzhe Gu, University College London