[accessibleimage] dissemination of aesthetics course.

Hello to everybody,

Faced with two problems, I have decided to float them on the list to see if anybody can help:

1) I am curently submitting an assembled curriculum for an aesthetics course for blind people to a third level institution as part of a postdoctoral fellowship application. The course essentially breaks down the aesthetetic experience, as it has traditionally been described and theorized, into several individual components, and tries to filter these components through the lived aesthetic experiences of different blind people. It also examines these components from a variety of perspectives, ranging from cultural anthropology to perceptual psychology, from contemporary cultural theory to art education. The course is designed to supplement the variety of art courses that are available to the blind and visually impaired, by fostering a capacity for analytic reflection on various aspects of the experience of aesthetic reception. I am looking for advice on the best way to make the course available to blind and visually impaired people who are interested in exploring the (dis)continuities between their own aesthetic experiences and traditional accounts of the encounter with a site of beauty. A large portion of the course will be devised by means of discussion forums with groups of blind students, and by the distribution of embossed questionnaires. I am uncertain about how to most effectively disseminate the course once it is completed. Can anybody think of a suitable medium?

2) My second query relates to a book of mine that is being published later this year. The book explores the aesthetic experiences of blind people, and at a certain juncture I discuss the changes undergone by the conception of faces and places, harboured by the non-congenitally blind, as time passes. I am discussing with my editor the possibility of featuring drawings of faces and places by blind people. I am wondering if anybody knows of a blind person who has drawn such pictures, and who wouldn't mind his/her work being published in the book?

If anybody can advise me in relation to either of the questions, I would be a big help.

                         Take care,

                                        David Feeney.