216 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
deepen this stance by exploring these emotions in deaf development contexts and
responding to the challenges posed by diversity.
In their own response to this challenge, urbanization and interculturality scholars
phil Wood and Charles Landry (2008) characterize diversity not so much as a source
of problems, but as a means of resolving them:Dealing with and valuing diversity, difference and the desire for distinctive-
ness is the central dilemma of our age. Acknowledging and living at ease with
the landscape of diversities is different from focusing on differences. The
challenge is to create a coherent narrative for diversity and how it can answer
the problems of our age. (p. 23)In developing a framework of deaf flourishing (i.e., a cross-cultural approach to
deaf people’s wishes for dignified lives and well-being), from which notions of
identity and empowerment can be viewed, I have attempted to address sustainable
human development in a context of globalization and neoliberalism while taking
into account diversity and heterogeneity among sign communities.
presenting research on emancipation processes in Western, non-Western, and
transnational settings, while also applying an epistemological perspective to the
formation and politicization of deaf identities, I have aimed to offer insight into deaf
people’s lives and an understanding of their diverse social, cultural, linguistic, and
epistemic practices. This has involved using the concept of “deaf awakening” (i.e.,
the awareness process through which people come to claim deaf cultural identities,
both individually and collectively, and to call on society to acknowledge and value
these) to explore multiple perspectives on the transition from what Margaret Led-
with (2012) calls “an altered way of ‘knowing’ the world (epistemology)” in “changed
ways of ‘being’ in the world (ontology)” (p. 3).
This book began as an exploration of the spaces where this transition goes for-
ward, both in society and in the research process. In these spaces, boundaries are
blurred between a concept of human development as a cultural, even organic, pro-
cess that has been going on for millennia (Rogoff, 2003) and a competing concept
that defines it as a series of conscious interventions by multiple actors to achieve
economic, political, and social goals (Crewe & Axelby, 2013).
Reflecting on this anthropologically, Crewe and Axelby (2013) argue that “notions
of development as natural process and development as planned intervention are not in-
separable; nor are the boundaries between aid and development” (p. 3). They do not
discuss the notion of sustainability; however, in my view it can be situated in this space
in between,^1 being defined as the community’s capacity to employ its own resources
to deal with contemporary challenges: “Socially sustainable communities have the
capacity to deal with change and to adapt to new situations, attributes that are now
becoming increasingly essential in a globalized world” (Williams, cited in Duxbury &- Chapter 6 offers another reading of this notion.