This book presents the first ever comprehensive overview of national laws recognising sign languages, the impacts they have and the advocacy campaigns which led to their creation. It comprises 18 studies from communities across Europe, the US, South America, Asia and New Zealand. They set sign language legislation within the national context of language policies in each country and show patterns of intersection between language ideologies, public policy and deaf communities’ discourses. The chapters are grounded in a collaborative writing approach between deaf and hearing scholars and activists involved in legislative campaigns. Each one describes a deaf community’s expectations and hopes for legal recognition and the type of sign language legislation achieved. The chapters also discuss the strategies used in achieving the passage of the legislation, as well as an account of barriers confronted and surmounted (or not) in the legislative process. The book will be of interest to language activists in the fields of sign language and other minority languages, policymakers and researchers in deaf studies, sign linguistics, sociolinguistics, human rights law and applied linguistics.

Leading researchers in 30 nations describe the shared developmental, social, and educational issues facing deaf people filtered through the prism of unique national, regional, ethnic, and racial realities.

This volume profiles the fascinating and, at times, controversial concept of DEAF-SAME and its influence on deaf spaces locally and globally. The editors and contributors focus on national and international encounters (e.g., conferences, sporting events, arts festivals, camps) and the role of political/economic power structures on deaf lives and the creation of deaf worlds. They also consider important questions about how deaf people negotiate DEAF-SAME and deaf difference, such as differences in mobility, access to social and economic capital, ideologies, and epistemologies. The editors have organized the book into five sections--Gatherings, Language, Projects, Networks, and Visions. Taken all together, the 23 chapters in this book provide an understanding of how sameness and difference are powerful yet contested categories in deaf worlds.

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.

A groundbreaking study of deaf identity, minority politics, and sign language, traces the history of the deaf community in Japan.

The authoritative statement on the deaf, their education, and their struggle against prejudice.

Written by authors who are themselves Deaf, this unique book illuminates the life and culture of Deaf people from the inside, through their everyday talk, their shared myths, their art and performances, and the lessons they teach one another. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries employ the capitalized "Deaf" to refer to deaf people who share a natural language—American Sign Language (ASL—and a complex culture, historically created and actively transmitted across generations. Signed languages have traditionally been considered to be simply sets of gestures rather than natural languages. This mistaken belief, fostered by hearing people’s cultural views, has had tragic consequences for the education of deaf children; generations of children have attended schools in which they were forbidden to use a signed language. For Deaf people, as Padden and Humphries make clear, their signed language is life-giving, and is at the center of a rich cultural heritage. The tension between Deaf people’s views of themselves and the way the hearing world views them finds its way into their stories, which include tales about their origins and the characteristics they consider necessary for their existence and survival. Deaf in America includes folktales, accounts of old home movies, jokes, reminiscences, and translations of signed poems and modern signed performances. The authors introduce new material that has never before been published and also offer translations that capture as closely as possible the richness of the original material in ASL. Deaf in America will be of great interest to those interested in culture and language as well as to Deaf people and those who work with deaf children and Deaf people.

"Inside Deaf Culture relates deaf people's search for a voice of their own, and their proud self-discovery and self-description as a flourishing culture. Padden and Humphries show how the nineteenth-century schools for the deaf, with their denigration of sign language and their insistence on oralist teaching, shaped the lives of deaf people for generations to come. They describe how deaf culture and art thrived in mid-twentieth century deaf clubs and deaf theatre, and profile controversial contemporary technologies." Cf. Publisher's description.

The First Volume in the "Gallaudet Classics in Deaf Studies Series", Albert Ballin's greatest ambition was that The Deaf Mute Howls would transform education for deaf children and more, the relations between deaf and hearing people everywhere. While his primary concern was to improve the lot of the deaf person "shunned and isolated as a useless member of society," his ambitions were larger yet. He sought to make sign language universally known among both hearing and deaf. He believed that would be the great "Remedy," as he called it, for the ills that afflicted deaf people in the world, and would vastly enrich the lives of hearing people as well."--The Introduction by Douglas Baynton, author, Forbidden Signs. Originally published in 1930, The Deaf Mute Howls flew in the face of the accepted practice of teaching deaf children to speak and read lips while prohibiting the use of sign language. The sharp observations in Albert Ballin's remarkable book detail his experiences (and those of others) at a late 19th-century residential school for deaf students and his frustrations as an adult seeking acceptance in the majority hearing society. The Deaf Mute Howls charts the ambiguous attitudes of deaf people toward themselves at this time. Ballin himself makes matter-of-fact use of terms now considered disparaging, such as "deaf-mute," and he frequently rues the "atrophying" of the parts of his brain necessary for language acquisition. At the same time, he rails against the loss of opportunity for deaf people, and he commandingly shifts the burden of blame to hearing people unwilling to learn the "Universal Sign Language," his solution to the communication problems of society. From his lively encounters with Alexander Graham Bell (whose desire to close residential schools he surprisingly supports), to his enthrallment with the film industry, Ballin's highly readable book offers an appealing look at the deaf world during his richly colored lifetime. Albert Ballin, born in 1867, attended a residential school for the deaf until he was sixteen. Thereafter, he worked as a fine artist, a lithographer, and also as an actor in silent-era films. He died in 1933