Reflections of a Deaf Scholar 205
mixed audience of about 70 people, consisting of deaf community members, relatives,
and colleagues, when a member of the examination committee started the round of
questioning by expressing an appreciation of my intelligence. This caused a lot of
reaction among the deaf audience, who recalled patronizing teaching at deaf schools.
This continued when further questions followed on the experiences of interna-
tional deaf students at Gallaudet for whom learning ASL did not seem to be a barrier
to their empowerment. The next day in a national newspaper, a journalist who had
attended the defense wrote that “some academics seem to have difficulties believing
in the intellectual capacities of deaf people.” I was named “person of the Week” in
the newspaper, a sign that Flemish public opinion had moved much further than the
academy in support of deaf people’s emancipation.
Speaking only for myself, my challenge continues to consist in moving between
what is and what could be, in keeping spirits up in this never-ending movement and
in this “ethics of moderate crescendos” (Gescinska, 2011, p. 182). Gescinska (2011)
quotes Marcel:^17
one should say that each of us should make himself a free person—that he,
in the ways that are possible, should usefully employ the structural circum-
stances that enable freedom. In other words: Freedom is something that
should be conquered, a conquest that is then always partial, precious, and
contested. (p. 181) (translation by GDC)
Being able to continue doing research as a postdoctoral scholar at Ghent University
has been important for the recognition and further advancement of my work; for
putting my experiences into perspective; and, most of all, for enabling me to give
back to the community. It has also been crucial to the methodological reflection on
my work and ethnographic self, which has contributed to the development of an an-
thropology of deaf flourishing and a strength-centered perspective in ethnography.TOWARD AN ANTHROpOLOGy OF DEAF FLOURISHING
AND A STRENGTH-CENTERED ETHNOGRApHy
The process of looking back on one’s life trajectory with a critical and analytical eye
can be immensely powerful in terms of personal discovery and insight. When I wrote
this chapter, I was the only deaf scholar with her own government-funded research
projects in the Flemish academic context. As a postdoctoral scholar, I continued to
fight the same battle as I fought as a doctoral researcher, facing the daily challenges
of bias, exclusion, limited access, and neoliberal meritocracy that threaten academic
integrity, authenticity, and the quality of scholarship.
I am grateful to Ghent University for providing room for me to publish my
experiences as a deaf scholar and for providing me with the opportunity to de-
velop high-quality research over a 10-year period, with the means to encompass
community perspectives and interaction with stakeholders, and dissemination- For applications of subaltern theory (Spivak, 1995) in deaf studies, see also Ladd (2003).