Jingwen Li

How do we tell if something is going wrong with our vision? How do we frame and share our deeply personal visual encounters? How do we perceive the diverged visual experiences of others? My dissertation probes the challenge of capturing, mediating, and defining sensory experiences by historicizing some periphery ocular conditions such as “blurriness”, “strain” and “visual disturbances”. Titled “A Phantom History of Phantom Ocular Impairment (1830-1930)”, the project probes when, where, for whom, and how these periphery conditions become or cease to be a legible disease. I will trace their phantom history of diagnosis, representation, and treatment in transnational archives connecting East Asia (eg. the Canton Hospital, 1835- ; Peking Union Medical College, 1917- ) and North America (eg. the New York Eye Infirmary, 1820- ; Wills Eye Hospital, 1832- , the optical industry in Philadelphia). It ends with an ethnography of the enduring presence of these challenges in present healthcare encounters. Incorporating disability media studies and transnational histories, this project illustrates how persistent anxieties surrounding nonconforming bodies have influenced medical discourse, clinical communication, media technologies, notions of productivity, and the trajectory of global modernity.