Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part 1: Gatherings -- 1: The Emergence of International Deaf Spaces in France from Desloges 1779 to the Paris Congress of 1900 -- 2: A Global Stage: Sign Language Artistic Production and Festivals in International Contexts -- 3: The World Federation of the Deaf Youth Camp in Durban: An Opportunity for Learning, Networking, and Empowerment -- 4: Deaf Jewish Space and DEAF-SAME: The International Conferences of Deaf Jews in the Twentieth Century -- 5: Deaf Transnational Gatherings at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century and Some Afterthoughts -- Part 2: Language -- 6: The Paradox of International Sign: The Importance of Deaf-Hearing Encounters for Deaf-Deaf Communication across Sign Language Borders -- 7: One Language, or Maybe Two: Direct Communication, Understanding, and Informal Interpreting in International Deaf Encounters -- 8: Challenging Sign Language Lineages and Geographies: the Case of Eritrean, Finnish, and Swedish Sign Languages -- 9: Signed Language Sovereignties in Viet Nam: Deaf Community Responses to ASL-Based Tourism -- 10: Social Media Practices of Deaf Youth in Turkey: Emerging Mobilities and Language Choice -- Part 3: Projects -- 11: Andrew Foster Touches Eternity: From Nigeria to Fiji -- 12: Exploring the Contours of DEAF-SAME Kinship Bonds and Mutuality in United Methodist Short-Term Missions -- 13: A Deaf Leadership Program in Nigeria: Notes on a Complicated Endeavor -- 14: Sign Language Recognition: Tensions between Specificity and Universalism in International Deaf Discourses -- 15: Implementing the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Supporting the Deaf Community in Chile through Legal Expertise -- Part 4: Networks -- 16: A Deaf Diaspora? Imaging Deaf Worlds Across and Beyond Nations.

Cochlear implants are considered the gold standard in intervening on deafness and hearing loss. However, "success" is predicated upon routine and consistent use, which in turn is predicated on the ability to maintain devices. This essay considers what happens when use is partial and precarious and asks what happens when external implant processors become obsolete. Contributing to Science and Technology Studies scholarship on obsolescence and the binary between use and nonuse, I analyzes the ongoing aftermath of a central government program in India that provides children living below the poverty line with cochlear implants. Drawing on ethnography and interviews, the article analyzes how families struggle financially and logistically to maintain devices, resulting in cycles of partial use and precarious use. Ultimately, devices become obsolete, and families cannot afford compulsory upgrades. The state and corporations claim these families abandon the devices. In contrast to this claim, the article stresses that we must examine abandonment differently, by attending to how families are abandoned by the state and corporations. Arguing that obsolescence as a concept obscures relationality and functions apolitically, the concept of abandonment is instead put forward to analyze ruptures that occur when consistent and reliable biotechnology use is no longer possible.

This article ethnographically analyses how groups (and not just individuals) are produced in business process outsourcing (BPO) workplaces. In order to mitigate an unstable labour pool, corporations hire deaf workers to perform identical BPO work regardless of their qualifications and backgrounds. These hiring practices serve to cement existing relationships and produce deaf workers as a group marked only by deafness. This article explores how engaging in the same work articulates with deaf young adults' 'sameness work' to produce ambivalent deaf groups. It also analyses the everyday practices of deaf employees, their relationships with their normal co‐workers who 'love' them, and the ways that value is reconfigured in the workplace through the existence of disabled workers. This article argues that in contrast to dominant representations of disabled people as unemployable, the (re)inscription of deafness as a source of multiple forms of value begs for a broader analysis of the role of disability in late capitalism.

This article analyses how the structure of multi-level marketing, through the production of the categories of uplines and downlines, fractures deaf sociality in urban India. Hierarchies have always existed as part of a deaf moral economy in which deaf people share news and information, teach each other sign language and help each other to develop. However, the intermingling of moral and financial economies as a result of post-liberalisation political and economic changes has led to divisive fractures. More generally, this article uses the example of deaf sociality to examine how the neoliberal category of 'community' can be disharmonious and produced through tensions and negotiations. In addition, deaf social, moral and economic practices point to the potential and actual coerciveness of sociality. As a study of disharmonious socialities, this ethnographic account offers an analysis of what happens when community becomes a springboard for accessing multiple forms of value.

This article is an attempt to explore the role, if any, that transnational deaf identity politics plays within the lives of members of the Delhi Foundation of Deaf Women (DFDW). Taking a two-pronged ethnographic and historical approach, I will examine how the DFDW came to exist, situating it within the field of organisations serving the deaf in Delhi, as well as providing an overview of its structure and client profile. I will also examine the terrain of identity politics within the deaf community of the DFDW, and ask questions about what identity, deafness and kinship mean to its members. Most theory coming out of Deaf studies has ignored, until relatively recently, the category of gender. This article seeks to explore how culture and gender modify the constructions and experiences of Deaf identity.

Although it is commonly believed that deafness and disability limits a person in a variety of ways, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India describes the two as a source of value in postcolonial India. Michele Friedner argues that the experiences of deaf people offer an important portrayal of contemporary self-making and sociality under new regimes of labor and economy in India. Friedner contends that deafness actually becomes a source of value for deaf Indians as they interact with nongovernmental organizations, with employers in the global information technology sector, and with the state. In contrast to previous political economic moments, deaf Indians increasingly depend less on the state for education and employment, and instead turn to novel and sometimes surprising spaces such as NGOs, multinational corporations, multilevel marketing businesses, and churches that attract deaf congregants. They also gravitate towards each other. Their social practices may be invisible to outsiders because neither the state nor their families have recognized Indian Sign Language as legitimate, but deaf Indians collectively learn sign language, which they use among themselves, and they also learn the importance of working within the structures of their communities to maximize their opportunities. Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India analyzes how diverse deaf people become oriented toward each other and disoriented from their families and other kinship networks. More broadly, this book explores how deafness, deaf sociality, and sign language relate to contemporary society