Blinda personers icke-verbala kommunikation : studier om kroppsspråk, icke-verbal samtalsreglering och icke-verbala uttryck

The purpose of this thesis is to deepen the understanding of grown-up blind people’s non-verbal communication, including body expressions and paralinguistic (voice) expressions. More specifically, the thesis includes the following three studies: Blind people’s different forms of body expressions, blind people’s non-verbal conversation regulation and blind people’s experience of their own non-verbal expressions. The focus has been on the blind participants’ competence and on their subjective perspectives. I have also compared congenitally and adventitiously blind in all of the studies. The approach is mainly phenomenological and the qualitative empirical phenomenological psychological method is the primary methodological source of inspiration. Fourteen blind persons (and also some sigthed persons) participated. They have no other obvious disability than the blindness and their ages vary between 18 and 54. Data in the first two studies consisted of video recordings and data in the last study consisted of interviews. The overall results can be summarized in the following three points: 1. There are (almost) only similarities between the congenitally blind and adventitiously blind persons concerning their paralinguistic expressions. 2. There are mainly similarities between the two groups with respect to the occurrences of different body expressive forms. 3. There are also some differences between the groups. For example, the congenitally blind persons seem to have a limited ability to use the body in an abstract and symbolic way and they often mentioned that they have been told that their body expressions deviate from sighted people’s norms. But the persons in both groups also struggle to see themselves as unique persons who express themselves on the basis of their conditions and their previous experiences.

The Vulnerable Animals That Therefore We Are : (Non-)Human Animals in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love

Central to animal studies is the question of words and how they are used in relation to wordless beings such as non-human animals. This issue is addressed by the writer D.H. Lawrence, and the focus of this thesis is the linguistic vulnerability of humans and non-humans in his novel Women in Love, a subject that will be explored with the help of the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s text The Animal That Therefore I Am. The argument is that Women in Love illustrates the human subjection to and constitution in language, which both enables human thinking and restricts the human ability to think without words. This linguistic vulnerability causes a similar vulnerability in non-human animals in two ways. First, humans tend to imagine others, including non-verbal animals, through words, a medium they exist outside of and therefore cannot be defined through. Second, humans are often unperceptive of non-linguistic means of expression and they therefore do not discern what non-human animals may be trying to communicate to them, which often enables humans to justify abuse against non-humans. In addition, the novel shows how this shared but unequal vulnerability can sometimes be dissolved through the likewise shared but equal physical vulnerability of all animals if a human is able to imagine the experiences of a non-human animal through their shared embodiment rather than through human language. Hence the essay shows the importance of recognizing the limitations of language and of being aware of how the symbolizing effect of words influences the human treatment of its others.