Authentic Voices, Authentic Encounters: Cripping the University Through American Sign Language

Abstract

Discussions on disability justice within the university have centered disabled students but leaves us with questions about disability justice for the disabled scholar and disabled communities affiliated with universities through the lens of signed language instruction and deaf people. Universities use American Sign Language (ASL) programs to exploit the labors of deaf people without providing a return to disabled communities or disabled academics. ASL courses offers valuable avenues for cripping the university. Through the framework of cripping, we argue universities that offer ASL classes and profit from them have an obligation to ensure that disabled students and disabled academics are able to navigate and succeed in their systems. Disabled students, communities, and academics should capitalize upon the popularity of ASL to expand accessibility and the place of disability in higher education.

What About Me? Theorizing Power and Pushback in Advancing Marginalized Identities

“…question were resolved, these women found a solution. Robinson and Henner (2018) contend that universities that teach American Sign Language (as a "foreign language;" in an interpreting program; as part of a Deaf Studies program) profit from these courses. In return, these institutions have an obligation to make sure that disabled students and disabled academics are able to succeed in academia.…”

Evidence-Based Practices in Deaf Education: A Call to Center Research and Evaluation on the Experiences of Deaf People

“…Yet deaf individuals themselves have rich and invaluable experiences (Holcomb, 2010; Kovarsky, 2008; Kusters et al, 2017) that are critical to understanding both the systemic barriers that lead to education and employment gaps as well as strategies for navigating through them (Graham & Horejes, 2017). In a sense, this call to include deaf scholars in deaf education research is an extension of what O. Robinson and Henner (2018) and McKinney (2016) refer to as cripping the academy , with a specific application of deaf people within education research.…”

Theorising the deaf body: using Lefebvre and Bourdieu to understand deaf spatial experience

“…Others may be less so, such as institutions deliberately employing deaf signers who can also speak over monolingual deaf signers in those roles, to minimise the cost of communication support they must offer. 90 An understanding of deaf bodies as bearers of value must reveal 'bodily capital as both an individual asset and a structurally unequal social product that yields greater profits to those in the position to appropriate it'. 91 One example of research with deaf people which could be further analysed using this approach is the way in which deaf people can be employed both as a way of signalling diversity and social justice in corporations, but also as a way of taking advantage of deaf peoples' limited employment opportunities.…”