Universidade de Lisboa

Graduate Student, Instituto da Educação

PhD Student on History of Education

University of Lisbon

Thesis Title: Normalization, progress and dissemination of adapted pedagogic discourses and technologies intended for blind and low-visioned students, late XVIIIth and XIXth centuries.

About

My PhD thesis, on process, is meant to be a basis for a detailed study and questioning on the birth and social conscience of the born-blind and low-visioned subjects, at the end of the XVIII th century and throughout the XIX th century, and the relation of this particular sociological and historical phenomena with the evolving of the modern schooling concept.
My intention is to question how effective was this nurture of different characteristic bodies into the process of creation of autonomic, controlled, productive and consuming, both socially and individually, normalized citizens.
Thus, I propose to analyze the outgrowth of these particular modern citizens since the identification and characterization of its visual stigma onto the process of self-conscience and self-government achieved, or at least suggested, by modern models of education. This assumption is based on the recognition of particularly elaborated normalization technologies and institutionalized behaviours and justifies my deep interest on some of the first schools established specifically to overcome the lack of the sense of vision per specific architecture, materials and pedagogical discourses. Also, I suggest a prowl at its institutional purposes, its sociological support and pedagogical discourses and its achievements over other systems of management of the different self, like asylums or home keeping.
Neurological concepts, such as plasticity, applied on what I consider to be a conscious scientific and social turning point, will be a deep resource of understanding the changing of perspective over the stigmatic subject, as far as science may be considered the traditional discourse of truth for human societies since modern ages. Science will also be the explanation, developed far ahead, of the medical and psychological intermission on this pedagogical process for some new-born professions.
Amongst the social technologies for behaviours normation within the modern states construction processes, I find particularly meaningful some sensorial specificities emerging from traditional stigmatic situations such as blindness, low-vision and deaf-blindness. They rely on the assumption of the body mould aptness of management through adapted materiality and spaces, therefore performing the equivalent act of modelling as regular schools over standard bodies and standard sense abilities. Thence my specific interest on adapted pedagogical materiality throughout my work.

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