Brígida Cristina Maestres Useche – PhD Social Psychology – BA Sociology
Assistant Professor – Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
Part Time Researcher – CareNet Group – IN3 Institute
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Throughout my career as a researcher, I’ve been interested in how reality is constructed and produced, both within/by political systems (policies, legislative actions) as well as within/by persons, subjects/subjectivities that have been defined as ‘the other’ (the victimized, the sickened, the disabled). I have tied this epistemic interest to the diverse ‘ways of seeing’, which has finally driven me to the embodied matter of blind vision and its phenomenological research.

I am particularly interested in blind vision because of the nature of blind reality. This interest has been nurtured by the production of fictional narrative, such as chronicles, poetics of objects, sketches, drawings, and photographs, and music interpretation – percussion, above all, as a way of constructing a sensitive and tactile reality.

In this sense, my path can be understood as a process that began as a projective interest in the vision of political systems and resulted in my own vision experience, that is to say, in a project drawn from my own existence as a person diagnosed with low vision, a project reluctant to words and other captures of biopolitics related to disability/impairment. Thus, I am driven by a vital political interest gradually born in the narrative, photographic and musical arts, a potent methodology for dismantling dominant discourses nested in our own experiences. This path has enabled me to produce a discourse and an experience in which blind vision is not understood as a lack of something, but as an episteme that builds reality and puts forward a particular aesthetics of the world. For instance, I speak in terms of “animismo del ojo inquieto” to refer to such a way of vision and its phenomenology, emphasizing the role of the body as a sensorium, and the social and individual experience of constructing reality.

In the end, it has been a transformative process that has influenced both my use of scholarly language and my pedagogical practice as a professor.

bmaestres@uoc.edu
https://carenet.in3.uoc.edu/project/brigida-maestres/
instagram: @the_wandering_eye_project
https://www.instagram.com/the_wandering_eye_project/