6 Acknowledgments
In Cameroon, Margaret and Aloysius n’jok Bibum have been a source of inspi-
ration for me, and I want to extend my profound gratitude for their friendship,
shared experiences, and understanding of development.
this book was written during my postdoctoral research fellowship from the
research Foundation Flanders at Ghent university, Belgium, and completed during
my Marie skłodowska-Curie fellowship at the university of Manchester in the unit-
ed Kingdom, for both of which I am immensely grateful. I respectively thank herwig
reynaert at Ghent and Alys young at Manchester for helping me to make the most
of these tremendous opportunities.
I would particularly like to express my utmost thanks to my parents Jan and
Liliane; my grandmother Julia and my late grandparents Alfred, Maria, and Mau-
rice; my brother roel; my sister-in-law Joke; and my godson Mathijs and my new
baby nephew Floris for their loving encouragement and for graciously living with a
nomad. I would also like to thank my godson Felix, his parents Mark and Kathleen,
and his brothers Basil and Louis, for their warmth, support, and understanding;
renaat and Alena, and Ayfer, for their friendship; and sam, for always being there.
Lastly, I am much obliged and humbly thankful to all the people who have in
any way fostered this work and encouraged me to continue. throughout the past
ten years, so many individuals across the globe have shared their experiences
and research on the lives of deaf people with me. so great has been the quantity
and quality of this correspondence that it would be impossible to list every name.
however, no shared experience has gone unappreciated, and I remain in awe of the
extraordinary hope, courage, and human spirit revealed in each one.****thanks to the editors and publishers whose generous permissions have enabled me
to integrate the following selection of published papers into this book, some inte-
grally and some with changes:· De Clerck, G. (2007). Meeting global deaf peers, visiting ideal deaf places:
Deaf ways of education leading to empowerment. An exploratory case study.
American Annals of the Deaf, 152(1), 5–
· De Clerck, G. (2009a). Identiteitsdynamieken in vlaamse dove rolmodellen:
Een verkenning van tendenzen in emancipatieprocessen in dovengemeen-
schappen en parallellen met etnische minderheden in Europa [Identity
dynamics in Flemish deaf role models: An exploration of trends in emanci-
pation processes in deaf communities and parallels with ethnic minorities in
Europe]. Volkskunde, 110 (2), 117–136.
· De Clerck, G. (2009b). I don’t worry because I have my education: translated
deaf people moving toward emancipation. Medische Antropologie [Medicine
Anthropology Theory], 21 (1), 131–158.
· De Clerck, G. (2012a). Contributing to an era of epistemological equity: A
critique and alternative to the practice of science. In P. v. Paul & D. F. Moores