Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning

180 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning

ways of knowing and learning—that is, for deaf epistemologies. I have taken time to

learn to “master” telling my own life story from a strength-centered perspective and

to learn from life and from my research participants.

Tamara Kohn (2010) describes how the anthropologist’s self-reflection can be an

act of freedom, agency, and empowerment that is

realized through the ethnographer’s altering emotional connections to

memory and flexibility in allowing for a changed understanding of the self.

Truly memorable experiences are ones that slap us in the face with personal

embodied senses of pain, grief, hilarity, disgust, etc., and then, instead of

crumbling away until only remnants remain, the memories become reworked

due to the continually extended dialogic relationship the ethnographer has

with her maturing self through her experiences with others. To recognise

these subtle changes and allow for these altered framings to feature in our

teaching and writing and “knowing” is to revel in the processes of serendipity

and reflexivity and to celebrate the often surprising nature of human interac-

tion. (p. 197)

In the present chapter, I dedicate much discussion to this extended dialogue be-

tween my own coming-of-age story and research (my own and others) on deaf

empowerment and inspiring and alternative deaf life trajectories. Employing the

self-conscious methodological framework I have developed here, I am turning

my ethnographic self—with its memories, experiences, and reflections—into a

resource, thereby illuminating how my own location in changing contexts and in

relation to a young and evolving field of deaf studies has influenced my choice of

methodological, epistemological, and theoretical approaches and interpretations

for my research.

FINDING LIGHT AFTER DARKNESS: DEAF CULTURE

AS AN ALTERNATIVE LIFE TRAJECTORy

For many individuals, the notion of the deaf life trajectory involves “finding light”; that

is, discovering a community made up of people like themselves and finding scope

for personal development and identity. The stories and experiences of deaf people,

such as the following one recounted by Johan, a Flemish deaf community member

who was also cited in the introduction of Chapter 1, reveal the centrality of deaf

awareness to their lives and their flourishing (also see Chapters 3 and 4):

I feel that most things come from myself. I fought, looked, on my own. I took

a deaf course. I tried. I feel that is because I have a seed inside, a deaf seed. It

could not open, but a deaf friend helped me—she poured water on the seed,

so that it could open and grow like a flower. That is connected to my mind.

Deaf people have a seed, and that automatically gives us the ideas and tells us

what to do so that we can find our way through life—now learn sign language,

then later that, etc. I looked for all those things myself, and that was success-

ful. I noticed that many international deaf people had the same experiences