Post by Admin on Feb 12, 2024 22:10:15 GMT
INTERVIEW | HUMAN RIGHTS
What Can Deaf Philosophy Teach the World — and How Will It Change It?
Deaf philosophy is opening up new worlds, challenging us all to see hearing disabilities not as a loss but as a gain.
By George Yancy , TRUTHOUT
PublishedFebruary 11, 2024
truthout.org/articles/what-can-deaf-philosophy-teach-the-world-and-how-will-it-change-it/
Iknow what it is like to be a Black philosopher within predominantly white spaces. I know that sense of feeling invisible and alienated. But until recently I had given little attention to what it means to exist at the intersection of being a Deaf woman of color within philosophical spaces predominantly populated by nonsigning hearing philosophers. We must all be careful to avoid neglecting different forms of injustice that deny different modalities of human flourishing. In thinking through my own inattention to this axis of difference, I’ve wondered how many of us within nonsigning hearing communities falsely judge the Deaf community as one of pervasive loss, where one’s hearing community is the standard against which “loss” is defined.
How might we rethink or even militate against thinking about a Deaf community as one of loss as opposed to one of gain? Why is it that so many see human variation through the lens of medicalization, where something (a difference), must be corrected, made closer to “normal”? How have hearing parents themselves failed to understand the needs of their own deaf children because the former have no real sense of just how their deaf child can flourish within a signing community? What is the meaning of hearing from the perspective of a deaf person? And what does it mean ethically to raise a deaf person in a world that valorizes hearing as the hegemonically normative?
In this exclusive interview for Truthout, I am honored to speak with Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, who is the world’s first signing Deaf woman to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy. Burke is a professor of philosophy and a bioethicist at Gallaudet University, the world’s only bilingual liberal arts college for the deaf. Burke is also coeditor of the distinguished Journal of Philosophy of Disability, along with Joel Michael Reynolds.
George Yancy: Many Black professional philosophers point out that they were typically the only Black students in their philosophy classes. This was certainly true for me. I imagine that this has slightly changed, but philosophy continues to be a predominantly white male space. This has led many BIPOC philosophers to critically engage the normative assumptions embedded within Western philosophy. This includes rethinking how what is knowable (epistemology), what we value (axiology), what is “real” (ontology/metaphysics), and what, for example, constitutes justice (ethics), depends upon how we are situated in terms of racialized lived experiences. This reexamination belies the assumptions of ideal theory, which abstracts away from social reality, as the late philosopher Charles Mills would argue. Feminist philosophy has also called critical attention to the ways in which philosophy has excluded women from the field. As the first signing Deaf woman to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy in the world, I think that your position raises all sorts of deeply significant questions. Western philosophy is both ocular-centric and hearing-centric. Discuss some of the ways in which being deaf challenges various metaphilosophical issues in Western philosophy.
Teresa Blankmeyer Burke: Where a philosopher is situated in time and place can certainly shape how they approach philosophy, including the spaces where we engage in philosophy. As a bilingual Deaf philosopher who teaches philosophy in both American Sign Language (ASL) and English at Gallaudet University, a bilingual university whose undergraduate student population is primarily deaf or hard of hearing, I’ve had to think about how we do philosophy in a signed language, how to teach philosophy in a bilingual environment using written English and ASL, how to teach philosophy in ASL where there is no standard lexicon of philosophical terms in ASL or ASL translations of canonical spoken/written language philosophical texts, and how to do this in a way that includes and incorporates signing Deaf community social and cultural norms.
The experience of being a Deaf philosopher in an academic space that was created by and for nonsigning hearing philosophers has been instrumental to the way that I think about philosophy and philosophical issues. For example, there is the question of “what does it mean to be deaf?” When I pose this question to my colleagues and students in the signing Deaf community the primary responses I get are tied to questions about language and cultural identity — for example, “What does it mean to be a member of this community of people who use a signed language?” When I offer this question to nonsigning hearing people, the responses are very much focused on an audiological or pathological orientation — “What does it mean to be in the world without the sensory experience of being able to hear?” In my conversations with the philosopher Laurie Ann Paul, whose work on transformative experience has engaged with the metaphysical question of the transformative experience of obtaining a cochlear implant, we have discussed conceptions of being Deaf and deafness.
In my discussions with hearing laypersons, their concept of the category of “deaf” is much narrower, restricting the label to include persons who have virtually no response to auditory stimulus — with or without the use of auditory devices. In the spaces I inhabit as a signing Deaf person who grew up as a hard of hearing child using hearing aids, I view the category of “deaf” as analogous to a three-dimensional axis, such as the x,y,z Cartesian coordinates defining a point in space. The x line represents the information represented on an individual’s audiogram, which ranges from medical descriptions of profoundly deaf (e.g. no audition or can hear a jet engine) to mild hearing loss (is more able to comprehend spoken conversations in a quiet room).
The y represents the sociocultural position of the individual, which captures language community membership(s) ranging from primarily uses a signed language (e.g. ASL) in daily life to primarily uses a spoken language (e.g. English) in daily life. And there are people like me, whose days are split between language modalities (signed, spoken, written) and languages (ASL, English, Spanish, and these days, I’m also studying Portuguese). The z axis represents the language flourishing of the user, and this takes a little more unpacking. For centuries, educating deaf people has been a struggle between methods — is using a signed language best or is it better to teach deaf people to speech-read and speak? A consequence of this pedagogical struggle has been the pervasive language deprivation that occurs for deaf people who were not given the opportunity to acquire a language — any language — when their brains were most receptive to this. So, the z axis represents the continuum ranging from language flourishing to language deprivation.
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What Can Deaf Philosophy Teach the World — and How Will It Change It?
Deaf philosophy is opening up new worlds, challenging us all to see hearing disabilities not as a loss but as a gain.
By George Yancy , TRUTHOUT
PublishedFebruary 11, 2024
truthout.org/articles/what-can-deaf-philosophy-teach-the-world-and-how-will-it-change-it/
Iknow what it is like to be a Black philosopher within predominantly white spaces. I know that sense of feeling invisible and alienated. But until recently I had given little attention to what it means to exist at the intersection of being a Deaf woman of color within philosophical spaces predominantly populated by nonsigning hearing philosophers. We must all be careful to avoid neglecting different forms of injustice that deny different modalities of human flourishing. In thinking through my own inattention to this axis of difference, I’ve wondered how many of us within nonsigning hearing communities falsely judge the Deaf community as one of pervasive loss, where one’s hearing community is the standard against which “loss” is defined.
How might we rethink or even militate against thinking about a Deaf community as one of loss as opposed to one of gain? Why is it that so many see human variation through the lens of medicalization, where something (a difference), must be corrected, made closer to “normal”? How have hearing parents themselves failed to understand the needs of their own deaf children because the former have no real sense of just how their deaf child can flourish within a signing community? What is the meaning of hearing from the perspective of a deaf person? And what does it mean ethically to raise a deaf person in a world that valorizes hearing as the hegemonically normative?
In this exclusive interview for Truthout, I am honored to speak with Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, who is the world’s first signing Deaf woman to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy. Burke is a professor of philosophy and a bioethicist at Gallaudet University, the world’s only bilingual liberal arts college for the deaf. Burke is also coeditor of the distinguished Journal of Philosophy of Disability, along with Joel Michael Reynolds.
George Yancy: Many Black professional philosophers point out that they were typically the only Black students in their philosophy classes. This was certainly true for me. I imagine that this has slightly changed, but philosophy continues to be a predominantly white male space. This has led many BIPOC philosophers to critically engage the normative assumptions embedded within Western philosophy. This includes rethinking how what is knowable (epistemology), what we value (axiology), what is “real” (ontology/metaphysics), and what, for example, constitutes justice (ethics), depends upon how we are situated in terms of racialized lived experiences. This reexamination belies the assumptions of ideal theory, which abstracts away from social reality, as the late philosopher Charles Mills would argue. Feminist philosophy has also called critical attention to the ways in which philosophy has excluded women from the field. As the first signing Deaf woman to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy in the world, I think that your position raises all sorts of deeply significant questions. Western philosophy is both ocular-centric and hearing-centric. Discuss some of the ways in which being deaf challenges various metaphilosophical issues in Western philosophy.
Teresa Blankmeyer Burke: Where a philosopher is situated in time and place can certainly shape how they approach philosophy, including the spaces where we engage in philosophy. As a bilingual Deaf philosopher who teaches philosophy in both American Sign Language (ASL) and English at Gallaudet University, a bilingual university whose undergraduate student population is primarily deaf or hard of hearing, I’ve had to think about how we do philosophy in a signed language, how to teach philosophy in a bilingual environment using written English and ASL, how to teach philosophy in ASL where there is no standard lexicon of philosophical terms in ASL or ASL translations of canonical spoken/written language philosophical texts, and how to do this in a way that includes and incorporates signing Deaf community social and cultural norms.
The experience of being a Deaf philosopher in an academic space that was created by and for nonsigning hearing philosophers has been instrumental to the way that I think about philosophy and philosophical issues. For example, there is the question of “what does it mean to be deaf?” When I pose this question to my colleagues and students in the signing Deaf community the primary responses I get are tied to questions about language and cultural identity — for example, “What does it mean to be a member of this community of people who use a signed language?” When I offer this question to nonsigning hearing people, the responses are very much focused on an audiological or pathological orientation — “What does it mean to be in the world without the sensory experience of being able to hear?” In my conversations with the philosopher Laurie Ann Paul, whose work on transformative experience has engaged with the metaphysical question of the transformative experience of obtaining a cochlear implant, we have discussed conceptions of being Deaf and deafness.
In my discussions with hearing laypersons, their concept of the category of “deaf” is much narrower, restricting the label to include persons who have virtually no response to auditory stimulus — with or without the use of auditory devices. In the spaces I inhabit as a signing Deaf person who grew up as a hard of hearing child using hearing aids, I view the category of “deaf” as analogous to a three-dimensional axis, such as the x,y,z Cartesian coordinates defining a point in space. The x line represents the information represented on an individual’s audiogram, which ranges from medical descriptions of profoundly deaf (e.g. no audition or can hear a jet engine) to mild hearing loss (is more able to comprehend spoken conversations in a quiet room).
The y represents the sociocultural position of the individual, which captures language community membership(s) ranging from primarily uses a signed language (e.g. ASL) in daily life to primarily uses a spoken language (e.g. English) in daily life. And there are people like me, whose days are split between language modalities (signed, spoken, written) and languages (ASL, English, Spanish, and these days, I’m also studying Portuguese). The z axis represents the language flourishing of the user, and this takes a little more unpacking. For centuries, educating deaf people has been a struggle between methods — is using a signed language best or is it better to teach deaf people to speech-read and speak? A consequence of this pedagogical struggle has been the pervasive language deprivation that occurs for deaf people who were not given the opportunity to acquire a language — any language — when their brains were most receptive to this. So, the z axis represents the continuum ranging from language flourishing to language deprivation.
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