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8
Nurturing Deaf
Flourishing Sustainably
in Times of Diversity
In this chapter I explore processes of knowledge production during development
practice using examples from deaf community meetings in Uganda as well as trans-
national interactions and dramatic performance in Cameroon. When looking into
these processes, I have found that concepts of development “emerge from the wild”
(i.e., in the settings themselves), sometimes through culturally-embedded insights
and metaphors such as fertility symbols. These emergent concepts are shaped by
language and cultural mindsets and practices, and they appear to combine in a
complex fashion to create new spheres of thought. In this chapter, I seek further
understanding of the production and exchange of indigenous, expert, and individ-
ual knowledge and how these might be harnessed for sustainable development; this
goal is innovative and challenging, both for theory and practice.
In the first section of this chapter I discuss development as a spontaneous and
planned process, couching sustainability as existing between these in deaf communi-
ties’ marshaling of resources to solve problems. Next, I move on to indigenous notions
of deaf flourishing that emerge “from the wild” during transnational interactions in
the Cameroonian deaf community and then look at this group’s hybrid co-produc-
tion of knowledge through performance. In the subsequent section, I discuss the
potential of a south-south exchange between Cameroon and Uganda, exploring the
tree as a sustainability-oriented notion of development.
Finally, in this chapter, I home-in on epistemic practices in the formation of in-
digenous conceptions of development in these two countries, taking a genealogical
stance that illuminates diversity. My concluding thoughts touch on the challenges
presented by the valorization of deaf indigenous learning in research on language,
mind, and culture and in the field of deaf studies; such challenges include ensuring
an adequate theoretical and real-life integration of the complex and hybrid forma-
tion of concepts in practice.UNDERSTANDING DEAF DEVELOpMENT SUSTAINABLy: A MUTUAL
INTERACTION BETWEEN HOpE AND DESpAIR
This book opened with a discussion of Dominique Moïsi’s (2009) “geopolitics of
emotion,” a concept for illuminating the role of collective hope, fear, and humili-
ation in the 21st-century tendency to emphasize difference. I applied Moïsi’s view
of this “century of identity” to identity dynamics in deaf communities in order to
gain insight into emancipation and sustainability. In this concluding chapter I