Panel: Sound, Narrative, and Technologies of Subjectivity
Copanelists: Johannes Klabbers
In the research examining and documenting deaf individuals’ acquisition of English in both its written and spoken forms, their literacy narratives have tended to focus on interactions with the hearing world and the impact of those interactions on the formation of identity. Themes that emerge from these personal stories disclose feelings of isolation and separateness in the hearing world, which are sometimes remedied by embracing American Sign Language and being welcomed into the D/deaf community. Other issues that arise within these autobiographies describe successful and unsuccessful methodologies and experiences in having to learn the language of the dominant culture.
With the introduction and increasing acceptance of cochlear implants (CI) for deaf children as young as twelve months in the US (and as young as four months in England), many of the familiar tropes and conceits of deaf literacy narratives are changing. This population is beginning to be of interest to researchers in the fields of deafness and of literacy. However, most of that research has been quantitative in nature, analyzing progress in terms of standardized testing. Little has been collected that is qualitative, allowing this new generation of deaf people to tell their own stories. This fertile area of investigation is of particular interest to those of us teaching college-age deaf students, particularly as they begin to write of their experiences in composition and cultural studies classes.
In this panel, we will share the personal narratives—in both written and signed forms—that span the generational experiences of deaf people acquiring written English literacy, with a special focus on the undocumented stories of those with cochlear implants. We will also question if the isolation and separateness that marked previous deaf generations are experienced differently by those who now are considered (or who consider themselves) “hearing,” as a result of new technologies.
Linda Rubel is Professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, one of the nine colleges of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her graduate degrees are in Nineteenth Century British Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She taught at Temple University and Gettysburg College, where she was also the assistant dean of the college. She has been at NTID for the past twenty-three years, and was department chair from 1993–2005. She and Rose Marie Toscano have been writing collaboratively since 1988, presenting nationally and internationally at conferences such as CCCC, CEA, NEMLA, and the International Conference on Literacy in Bordeaux. Her work has been published in the Journal of Basic Writing, American Annals of the Deaf, and Journal of Natural Inquiry.