The production and reception of assistance proposals between pedestrians and visually impaired persons during a course in orientation and mobility
Based on a detailed examination of video recordings of Locomotion and Orientation lessons, this chapter explores the social production and reception of assistance proposals to blind students by sighted pedestrians at an urban crossing. We examine the combination of several resources which makes publicly recognizable an embodied and embedded display of trouble (Kendricks and Drew, 2016). We show how passer-byes approach the blind person and introduce a confirmation query (“you want to cross?”), which is then systematically rejected by a blind student’s account (“I am learning locomotion right now”). This rejection reveals an another, contrastive setting with its alternate set of relevancies, sequential organization and categories. In this second context, the various attempts of passer-by to initiate help proposals become accountable interruptions of an ongoing exercise. We will show how the normative features of the visual order in which the blind student is immersed disturbs his attempts to turn into practice a set of alternatives, audible-based methods for crossing streets, without stopping him to cope with the normative consequences of the practical management of two contrastive settings. The very apprenticeship of a new alternative set of sensorial abilities bumps into the taken for granted visual practices which shape the common production and understandings of urban orders and disabilities.
