Naturally, material developed at various stages of the research for this book has been presented at talks and conferences, including a panel at the Association of American Geographers meeting in 2009. I have been fortunate enough to be invited to various talks in recent years, including in 2009 the Association of Medical Humanities at Durham University, the Centre for Medical Humanities at Hong Kong University, and the Department of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2010, at the ‘Geographies of Disability and Ageing’ conference at the University of Lancaster, I presented some work in progress in the presence of the blind geographer Ruth Butler, who had inspired some of my earlier graduate study. In 2011 the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, ‘The Afterlife of Phenomenology’ seminar series at Northwestern University, and the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh each invited me to present papers and generated useful questions and different perspectives.

Early material from the research for two chapters has therefore been published in different form. A selection of the arguments and literature covered in Chapter 8 appeared in a special issue on ‘Blindness’ in the literature journal Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature as ‘ “Looking on darkness, which the blind do see”: blindness, empathy and feeling seeing’ in 2013, and other material from the chapter was published as ‘Blindness, empathy, and “feeling seeing”: literary and insider accounts of blind experience’, in Emotion, Space and Society, also in 2013. Referee comments in both cases helped to refine the arguments, and one suggestion in particular opened up a relevant avenue within disability studies that significantly aided the final material. Likewise, some material on sensory substitution technologies for Chapter 7 was included as part of a chapter taking a different philosophical pathway, co-written with Mazviita Chirimuuta, and published as ‘A methodological Molyneux question: sensory substitution, plasticity and the unification of perceptual theory’, in D. Stokes, M. Matthen, and S. Biggs (eds), Perception and its Modalities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).