A Look at Blindness: Biopolitics of the Dystopia

Walter Meierjohann was Artistic Director of HOME from 2013 to 2018 and International Associate Director at the Young Vic in London. At the Young Vic, his productions included the European premiere of In the Red and Brown Water by Tarell McCraney and Kafka’s Monkey, which toured to Sydney, Melbourne, Athens, Paris, Tokyo, Istanbul, Taipei and New York. The production, which starred Kathryn Hunter, also showed in HOME’s 2015 opening season, with Hunter reprising her lead role.

Walter has worked extensively in Germany and the UK at theatres including: the Barbican; Liverpool Playhouse; Nottingham Playhouse; The Curve, Leicester; Residenztheater, Munich; Staatsschauspiel, Dresden; Schauspiel, Graz; and Arena, Berlin, for Peter Stein’s Faust Ensemble and Impulse Theatre Festival. Prior to joining the Young Vic, Walter was Artistic Director of Neubau at the State Theatre of Dresden. In opera, he has assisted the late Klaus-Michael Grueber in his productions of Aida (Nederlands Opera, Amsterdam) and Don Giovanni (Ruhrfestspiele).

Cassandra Chiu is a Singaporean Psychotherapist, Social Advocate, and Equal Opportunity Consultant. The challenges Chiu faced as a blind individual led to her passion in advocating for equal opportunities for Persons with Disabilities. She has spoken about disabilities on many platforms both locally and in the region to the people, private and public sectors. Chiu regularly writes about disabilities, her work has been published on The Straits Times Opinion page, Today, and has been featured in 50 Years of ASEAN by Singapore World Scientific and The World Economic Forum’s Agenda. Her first book about the Asian attitudes towards disabilities entitled ‘A Place for Us’ was published in March 2019.

Hannah M. Y. Ho is an Assistant Professor at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Her teaching includes postcolonial and minorities’ literatures. She researches on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. Her articles have appeared in Global Society, Asiatic and The Wenshan Review. She is co-editor of Engaging Modern Brunei: Research on Language, Literature and Culture (Springer).

Kuansong Victor, Zhuang is Fung Global Fellow at the Institute of International and Regional Studies, Princeton University, and International Postdoctoral Scholar at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. He hopes to use his research to contribute to current debates about how inclusion happens both in Singapore and around the world.