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7
Reflections of a Deaf Scholar:
Toward an Anthropology
of Deaf Flourishing
In the decade since I began researching the topic of empowerment, the process of
empowerment has also been at the core of my life, not just professionally but also
personally. The (ethical) question of how research on deaf empowerment can also be
empowering has always been salient. Analyzing and describing this process necessarily re-
quires what anthropologist Tamara Kohn (2010) conceptualizes as “a mobile reflexivity”;
that is, “a reflexivity to be found in the journey rather than the moment” (p. 187).
My personal and professional lives have developed in different places across the
world. I grew up in Flanders, a region of Belgium, where I enrolled in a doctoral
program at Ghent University and completed my first fieldwork with the Flemish
deaf community. I then traveled to the United States, where I performed fieldwork
with deaf people from around the world at Gallaudet University. Then I returned to
Belgium to complete my dissertation. My postdoctoral research took me to the West
African nation of Cameroon for long-term fieldwork. Back at Ghent, I expanded my
cross-cultural comparative work as a postdoctoral project on the sustainable devel-
opment of sign communities in Uganda and Flanders.^1
This journey of scholarship in diverse contexts has also been a personal journey
toward deaf flourishing, which, drawing on the anthropological work of Mathews
and Izquierdo (2010), I define in the present chapter as “an optimal state [of
well-being] of a [deaf] individual, [sign language] community, society, and the
world as a whole” (p. 5; see also the section of this chapter titled “Toward an Anthro-
pology of Deaf Flourishing and a Strength-Centered Ethnography”). This definition
of well-being includes emotional modes and spirits and is complementary to the
quality-of-life or capability approach of Sen (2009) and Nussbaum (2006),^2 which
centers on the questions, “What are people actually able to do and be?” and “What
real opportunities are available to them?” (Nussbaum, 2011, p. x), questions I con-
tinuously faced on my journey toward becoming the first deaf scholar to defend a
doctoral dissertation in sign language in Belgium, an academic process that was also
a deeply emotional experience.
I began the present volume by citing the work of Dominique Moïsi (2009) on
emotions and geopolitics in order to sketch the global scene, which interacts with- At the time of completing this book, I am doing life story work with British deaf people and deaf
migrants in the UK, where I am based at the University of Manchester as a Marie Curie Fellow. - The capability approach is discussed in Chapter 1, titled “What is a Good Life? Toward a Frame-
work of Deaf Flourishing.”