The Form that Flattens

Population, Space and Place

Disability & Society

In Australia, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) seeks to ensure that disabled people can access the support they need to live an independent life. There is limited knowledge around the NDIS client experience of signing deaf people-people who use Auslan as their primary language. This article reports on a pilot study that explored signing deaf people's experiences when accessing the NDIS to obtain a service package. Signing deaf people were invited to join a focus group and share their experiences. While all participants indicated that their initial contact with the NDIS and its provision of essential information through Auslan was adequate, they believed that access was difficult when they needed more detail. Also, all participants noted that NDIS staff members' knowledge of signing deaf people's life experience was an area for development. Overall, signing deaf people's consumer experience of the NDIS did not appear to meet their expectations. Points of interest • In Australia, signing deaf people can choose to be part of the new support system for disabled people-the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). • Signing deaf people in this study liked the way the NDIS gave them information through their sign language, Auslan, however, when they wanted to get more detailed information-they could not find it. • NDIS staff could develop their knowledge of signing deaf people's life experience. Better staff knowledge can improve signing deaf people's NDIS experience. • The research shares signing deaf people's experiences of the NDIS and adds to future research and better knowledge.

Human Organization, 2015

In our research with d/Deaf people in five families in the North and South Islands of New Zealand, we found that some of the challenges that we as researchers faced in our encounters with participants and within our mixed hearing and d/Deaf research group paralleled broader issues for this community. We use the details of our field research processes to explore the conundrum of d/Deafness, which may or may not be a disability and use this exploration to reflect on approaches to d/Deafness as revealed in our research findings. We argue that d/Deafness creates a predicament, but not only for the d/Deaf. We propose that practical solutions to this predicament may be thought of as services that enable citizenship, participation, communication, and care, rather than disability services, and this rethinking would ease the cognitive and cultural dissonance experienced by perfectly able d/Deaf people who have to access disability services in their everyday life.

1999

This article builds on Carol Padden and Tom Humphries' assertion that culturally identified deaf people inhabit a different center of knowledge than the non-deaf. Over generations of inhabiting a different center, deaf people have developed and transmitted embodied knowledge. The core of this knowledge is the role of sign language in developing language, cognition, and social structures. Modern fields of science search for truth by deconstructing false narratives. That is, anything worth being scientific is worth testing. While this approach may be effective for science, it devalues community knowledge since core tenets have no value until they are tested. To illustrate this, we critique a literary work, The Deaf Mute Howls, by deaf writer Albert Ballin in 1930. His work is particularly compelling because he suggests a radical approach to disability justice. Many of his claims were later verified by science, which presents questions about future research praxis centering deaf epistemology.

Defining the Boundaries of Disability

This chapter proposes a postulate about deaf-and-disabled ontologies, analyzed from a standpoint of ethics (axiology) and dissensus, to illustrate the plenitude of their hybrid corporealities. The first argument explores the dialectic tension between hearing-loss and deaf-gain, showing that they are not mutually exclusive. The second documents four proofs showing where disability-and-deafness coexist ontologically. The final argument illustrates fundamental errors concerning ontology in previous models of deafness and argues for a new biosocial paradigm to correct them. This argument also proposes that neglecting the phenomenology of the disabled body, including hearing-loss, in deaf experiences is as egregious an intellectual error for sociocultural theorists of deafness as the neglect of empirical evidence of deaf-gains, like the benefits of sign languages, by biomedical researchers. In sum, the chapter argues that all modes of being deaf are equally valid in terms of the ethics of the deaf-and-disabled body. Throughout the chapter, implications for theory and methodology are discussed, based on their grounding in an ethics constructed on deaf-centric axiological values.

Anthropology of Work Review, 1994

Afitbroptfogy ot Work tevfcw given and received; it is shared. As one of her informants, Gloria Murphy says, "I had always been a listener. I had never, ever been someone who shared myself too much before MS. But now I enjoy sharing myself, and I do think it helps others." Though there are times when chronic illness can isolate you from the world, in the long run it can also engage you in "Life." It engages you in trying to seek solutions for pain and suffering, or at least ways to ease it. Sharing these adverse experiences with others sustains the possibility that we can begin to understand ourselves and, possibly, to begin to gain a sense of what is essential to be human! References

This thesis examines written debates and discussions about Deaf ways of being and signed languages from within a selection of South Australian public print-media documents. Drawing on texts of both Deaf and hearing writers, the study also investigates Deaf and hearing relationships as played out within these discursive interactions, and documents a thirty year period in the community’s process of ‘coming to voice’ (Humphries 1996; 2008). The primary focus of the thesis is towards investigating and informing both theory and practice in deaf education. Data is sourced from English print media texts that appeared within South Australian Deaf community and mainstream press from 1970 until 2000. Sample texts were predominantly collected via Deaf community networks, with some also found in Deaf community and State library or archive collections. Data was subject to multi-layered analysis, beginning with grounded theory inductive thematic analysis, after which QSR NVIVO software program was used to further explore intertextuality. Next, a textual analysis, consisting primarily of linguistic metaphor analysis was conducted. This was followed by a narrative analysis and then finally by using Humphries’ 1996 and 2008 ‘strange’ and ‘Modern Deaf-self’ notions as a lens. Thematic and narrative analysis found the media discourse tending towards a number of key themes. Much of this centred around differing views about appropriate language use by deaf people, which incorporated exchanges and at times angry debates about the validity of Sign Languages and Deaf culture. Pedagogies within deaf education, and the structures of the education system itself, generated much heated discussion, along with differing views about skills, credentials, aptitudes and attitudes of teachers of the deaf. Other key debates were in relation to the cochlear implantation of deaf children, and the public representation of Deaf people and their Sign Language and culture. Analysis via Humphries’ 1996 and 2008 ‘strange’ and ‘Modern Deaf-self’ frames yielded numerous in-text samples of the expression of differing theories and core beliefs regarding Deaf ways of being. Also revealed within both this layer of analysis and the textual analysis are examples of a number of linguistic strategies used in maintaining and countering oppressive constructs and seeking the upper hand in debate. Such language use also reveals unacknowledged underlying theories about Deaf people held by the writers. Among the identified linguistic devices, metaphor featured heavily in creating and sustaining beliefs about interpersonal separation and connection, and the naturalness or otherwise of being deaf. Particularly important were metaphors of ‘barriers’, ‘silence’ and different ‘worlds’. The findings challenge educators and administrators to explore their own underlying beliefs regarding the authenticity and completeness of the biology and episteme of the deaf students whom they seek to educate, and to reflect on the value or otherwise that they place on adult Deaf indigenous ways of knowing as sources of information. The study also provides insight into Deaf and hearing relationships and communication practices, as well as heightening awareness of ways in which metaphorically framed representations can help or hinder understanding.

In this article, we introduce a complex world of working with qualitative data in multiple languages, modalities and media. We share some of the theoretical considerations that influenced our decisions about when to translate, what and how. We also report some of the multiple possibilities available to the researcher when analysing data in a visual language – in this case, British Sign Language – sharing considerations in choosing one method over another in differing circumstances. Through these discussions we draw attention to how translation issues are both similar and different from working solely with spoken language audio recordings. We then offer suggestions on the reporting and dissemination of results when more than one language is involved and when translation is at the heart of the research. While grounded in empirical Deaf Studies research, the methodological, cultural and theoretical issues raised here concerning translation, representation and ‘voice’ are applicable across social science disciplines, and particularly where minority communities and unwritten languages are at the heart of research activities.

The Second ISA Forum of Sociology (August 1-4, 2012), 2012

Deaf people negotiate their embodiment through corporeal experiences to provide a perception of what it means to be human. Some deaf people search for a framework where being deaf is human, not a disability. Other deaf people experience their deafness as a disability and use technology as a means to negotiate their embodiment and experiences. The role of technology or cybernetics, particularly cochlear implants, for the deaf will be examined as a way to understand cultural identities and diverse ideological perspectives concerning what it means to be deaf and normal. Then, this paper focuses on social constructed 'bodies' for the deaf using embodied theory and action as a part of a theoretical framework to showcase theoretical ideas and actualities of some deaf people's lives and experiences. These discussions are ways to open dialogues and collaborative inquiries on larger important issues such as what it means to be deaf and, in essence, human.