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This chapter highlights aspects of best practices of researchers and organizations when collaborating with deaf communities (such as in Brazil) to nurture them in achieving independence and enhanced quality of life. The authors’ joint study aimed to discover how outside funding institutions can aid the economic development of Kenyan deaf communities from the point of view of those communities. Community members identified problems of corruption and cultural misunderstandings, resulting in misuse of funding. They recommended community planning, management, and evaluation of projects, and that money from institutions go directly to communities, not via brokers, and deaf Kenyans be trained and thus empowered to make their own changes.

This chapter examines the relationship between interpreters/transliterators and the deaf community and the forces that altered that relationship. Topics discussed include the roots of the practice of sign language interpreting/transliterating in the deaf community, events that altered the social and cultural positionality of interpreters/transliterators as a group, legislative institutionalization of interpretation and transliteration, and academic institutionalization of the language of the Community.

This introduction is an overview of the book’s goals, with a brief summary of each chapter. The book followed an eponymous conference at Swarthmore College in 2008 at which activists and scholars in deaf matters exchanged ideas. The major thesis is that the interaction of activists and scholars is synergistic: activists find support in the work of scholars and scholars both have a responsibility toward the community they study and do better work when they understand activists’ concerns. The first part of the book is on the creation, context, and form of sign languages; the second, on social issues of Deaf communities. The global picture that emerges shows great similarity and continuity in the Deaf World.

In this chapter the authors converse about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in deaf communities, recommending national, not local, action with regard to funding, information dissemination, and information gathering. At the same time they focus attention on strengths deaf communities bring to this fight, such as peer-to-peer teaching. Communication barriers, the stigma of AIDS, and lack of recognition and funding from larger organizations hamper outreach and treatment efforts. Many are afflicted due to failure to deliver relevant information to deaf communities — from how the disease is transmitted, to what a plus symbol means (i.e. something negative, not positive), to what is appropriate medical treatment and how to get it. The lack of accessible language in outreach organizations has been a major culprit in this confusion.

In this chapter the author recounts his work, supporting the call for the establishment of schools and local and national organizations for deaf people, as well as supporting the call for international organizations to empower deaf communities to meet their goals. International aid institutions after World War II effected changes in the world view of deaf people that led to the establishment of schools for deaf children. Missionaries introduced foreign sign languages or the oral method rather than local sign languages. British Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language were imposed on African and Asian schools, although tribal sign languages persisted. Still, much work remains to be done in raising awareness of Deaf culture and of the validity of sign languages as natural human languages.

This chapter explores various facets of Deaf culture and community during the nineteenth century, revealing how the Deaf world has distinguished itself from the hearing populace via physical, cultural, and linguistic divides. Herein the chapter offers insights into Deaf organizations, Deaf-sponsored events, educational reforms, press and publications, workplace ideals, the issues of race and gender within the Deaf community, and the larger issue of Deaf nationalism. Nineteenth-century Deaf people were able to claim and honor their collective heritage. They felt themselves to be a people with a common heritage they were charged to remember and pass on to younger generations. They were taught their history, which allowed them in turn to claim their place in the larger community of the Deaf. In this way, they became a people, possessing at least a common heritage, even if they lacked a common homeland.

The authors extend chapter 9’s discussion to a different world arena, South Africa. They, too, talk about pernicious effects of lack of access to proper health information, particularly regarding sexual behavior. Meletse is an activist — and was the first Deaf African to self-identify as HIV-positive — and Morgan is a linguistic anthropologist. They met in 2000 when he was interviewed for a Deaf culture project and have been colleagues and friends ever since. In South Africa even some outreach workers are misinformed and pass on that misinformation. The social stigma associated with HIV/AIDS leads to secrecy, which compounds the problem. National organizations, including disability ones, do not meet their responsibilities to deaf communities, resulting in an ever-escalating number of cases.

This chapter looks at the annual reports of various schools of the deaf in the nineteenth century, which provide an illuminating perspective of the fledgling Deaf community. The chapter is an introduction to life in the residential schools from the point of view of the students themselves, wherein deaf people emerge into their own history, in their own words. In coming to the residential school and getting an education, many deaf students were moved to reflect on their deafness in new ways and tried to describe what they thought deafness meant and what it did not mean. Their stories reveal the ways in which deaf people thought about their lives, their deafness, their emerging sense of Deaf identity, and their education.

This chapter delineates three foundational social questions covering identity and its confluence with society. The authors, deaf academics, use these foundational questions as a framework to examine sociological perceptions of deaf identities. These questions guide the reader to an understanding of the structure of the deaf community, where it stands in human history, and who succeeds in the greater context of society in general. The authors integrate their own personal experiences within an academic framework grounded in sociology to explore the impact of social institutions, including the family, medical and educational systems, and the community influences on the social construction of deaf identities.

This chapter tells the story of how an unlikely pair came to open a school for the deaf in the United States and, in the process, establish a Deaf community. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787–1851) was a hearing American, a minister by training, and a graduate of Yale. Laurent Clerc (1785–1869) was a Deaf Frenchman, a fluent signer, and a gifted teacher at his former school, the National Institute at Paris. Together, they sought to transform the lives of the deaf in the United States. Gallaudet would come over time to absorb the Deaf lessons of his partner and teacher, such as Clerc's commitment to manualism and to literacy. Other Deaf values were harder to learn. Most significantly, Clerc's conviction that the deaf were the equals of the hearing provoked crises as well as revelations for the Deaf community at large.

This introductory chapter establishes “Deafness,” and not mere “deafness”—which speaks only of the body and its failings—as a vibrant, subaltern culture with a language, community, and history of its own. Deaf people, as a community, have frequently been uncomfortable with claiming the label “disabled” for themselves, preferring to claim that their linguistic, and not physical, difference lies at the heart of their Deafness. In that vein, we can view Deaf history as a case study of disability, a case study with which we can probe the limits of acceptance and tolerance for disabled bodies in the American body politic, in the histories shared between the deaf and the hearing, and, quite possibly, in their common future.

This chapter provides an overview of deaf education in Croatia, focusing on the current educational context and communication options for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. After a brief overview of the history of deaf education in the country, which dates back to the 1830s, the author provides essential demographic information and educational placement options for these students. Related challenges are covered, specifically the lack of evidence-based policy regarding teaching methodology. The Deaf community and Deaf culture in Croatia are discussed. Research studies outlining the language and literacy problems of deaf students in Croatia, as well as the socioemotional issues of deaf children, are presented.

This chapter traces the beginnings of a system of education geared toward the Deaf community, examining how such a system had survived well into the twentieth century. Manual education promoted classroom instruction in the sign language—the American Sign Language (ASL), in particular—although “sign language” in general could refer to many such languages during the nineteenth century. Typically, though not in every case, the phrases “the sign language” and “the natural language of signs” referred to what in the late twentieth century would come to be called ASL. The sign language was generally recognized as the natural language of deaf people, both as the language that they most commonly used among themselves and as the language that originated from the deaf community itself.

Ensuring inclusive, equitable, and quality education for all, including those with disabilities, is one of the Sustainable Development Goals to which Kenya has subscribed. The special education policy in Kenya specifically advocates for early assessment and intervention, appropriate adaptation and differentiation of the curricula, use of relevant pedagogical approaches, adequate and relevant educational resources, and accessible classroom communication for learners with diverse needs. Nonetheless, the education of deaf and hard-of-hearing learners in Kenya faces challenges, such as societal myths, barriers to curricular access, teacher incompetence in the language of instruction, and low expectations. Some members of the Deaf community remain apprehensive about the global trend toward inclusive education. The prospect of education of the deaf and hard-of-hearing learners in Kenya is bright, however, considering where the country has come from. Some issues that still need to be addressed are mentioned in this chapter.

In 2001, the first co-enrollment program for deaf children in Australia commenced at Toowong State School in Brisbane, Queensland. The impetus for the program came from the Deaf community and parents advocating for sign language to be used with their deaf children in an environment that provided access to the mainstream. Models of educating deaf children around the world were examined and co-enrollment was chosen as the model of operation to deliver a sign bilingual program that would best meet the needs of deaf students. The journey has been one of incredible learning for deaf and hearing children, their families, school staff, and the Queensland education system. With the changing landscape of deaf education, the impact of early detection and technology (including cochlear implants), and the introduction of a new national curriculum and all it entails, this evolving inner-city school continues to meet the unique needs of its students.

This concluding chapter ponders on the future of the Deaf community after the founding of the Clarke School in 1867, noting that as the nineteenth century came to a close the debates between manualism and oralism would only continue to intensify. Yet this story of the Deaf and the deaf is indicative of a much larger social scrutiny regarding the merits or demerits of disability within American society. In other words, it is a story larger than Deaf people. It tells us about ourselves. It asks us to consider how we embrace or reject difference in our midst. It forces us to wonder how well we make room for our fellow disabled citizens, even well into the succeeding centuries following the Deaf community's genesis.