This book presents a 'Traveller's Guide' to Deaf Culture, starting from the premise that Deaf cultures have an important contribution to make to other academic disciplines, and human lives in general. Within and outside Deaf communities, there is a need for an account of the new concept of Deaf culture, which enables readers to assess its place alongside work on other minority cultures and multilingual discourses. The book aims to assess the concepts of culture, on their own terms and in their many guises and to apply these to Deaf communities. The author illustrates the pitfalls which have been created for those communities by the medical concept of 'deafness' and contrasts this with his new concept of "Deafhood", a process by which every Deaf child, family and adult implicitly explains their existence in the world to themselves and each other.
Acknowledgements
Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Deaf Communities
2 Deafness and Deafhood in Western Civilisation - Towards the Development of a New Conceptual Framework
3 Twentieth Century Discourses
4 Culture - Definitions and Theories
5 Deaf Culture: Discourses and Definitions
6 Researching Deaf Communities - Subaltern Researcher Methodologies
7 The Roots of Deaf Culture: Residential Schools
8 The Roots of Deaf Culture: Deaf Clubs and Deaf Subalterns
9 Subaltern Rebels and Deafhood - National Dimensions
10 Conclusions and Implications
11 Afterword
Further Reading
Appendices
Bibliography
Index
