Deaf Flourishing 19
The open meeting in January 2013 drew a range of deaf participants, such as stu-
dents, the principal, community leaders, nGo representatives, and the church pas-
tor, whose blessing was required for any agreement among the 40 or so circle mem-
bers. For 4 hours, they followed their prepared agenda and looked for solutions,
trying to agree on a strategy for advancing their views. one pertinent question they
raised was, To whom can we explain that deaf children are part of our family and
that consequently we should be involved in organizing deaf education? The protest
and action plan led to the appointment of a new director and board and enabled
the teachers to stay (see Chapter 8 for further discussion of this activism).
This sense of dynamism can also be seen in their responses to recent require-
ments for deaf UgSL instructors to have degrees in order to teach in deaf schools.
This excluded deaf adults with high school qualifications and sign language instruc-
tor certificates. As a result, they have begun to creatively reorganize into small busi-
nesses, drawing on skills acquired during vocational training and entrepreneurship
workshops; in the meantime, deaf academics at Kyambogo University are preparing
to launch a Deaf Studies Diploma Course that will enable certified deaf instructors
to obtain degrees. This community continues to rally against numerous obstacles to
participation, including being thwarted by difficulties within their own leadership,
which has yet to institute fully democratic practices and retains a propensity to over-
look or downplay the community’s enormous potential. Such barriers can hopefully
be countered by their burgeoning commitment to active citizenship. (The Ugandan
context is further described in Chapter 8; also see Lutalo-Kiingi & De Clerck, 2015a,
2016, in press.)
In understanding such sign communities, Moïsi’s (2009) mapping of emotions
and analysis of the global geopolitical scene is valuable. For example, emotions
of hope, frustration, and humiliation come into play in the above vignettes from
Cameroon, Uganda, and Flanders. These vignettes represent various views of awak-
ening and offer a critical perspective on the notion of success, the distribution of
global neoliberal values of enhancement, and a competitive and individualized ethic
of success that has become tied to constructions of deaf identity and citizenship, but
puts community ethics under pressure (see also Dominelli, 2010; McIntyre, cited in
verhaeghe, 2012).
In this book I attempt to provide an alternative, inclusive, and open-ended per-
spective on deaf flourishing, documenting diverse ways in which sign communities
have viewed the world and creatively formulated unique life trajectories. I also argue
for the strengthening and valorization of their unique assets, including indigenous
knowledge and associated social, cultural, linguistic, and epistemic practices. These
assets can be transmitted as creative solutions to longstanding and often complex
challenges, and deaf flourishing takes into account such resources in the equaliza-
tion of knowledge exchange, which may foster the co-development of alternative
learning mechanisms. As categorizations of indigenous, expert, and scientific knowl-
edge are culturally constructed and sometimes hierarchically conceived, there is a
risk of grassroots community perspectives being de-prioritized, even by the mem-
bers themselves. Thus, room should be actively created for a wide spectrum of un-
derstandings of development, however nuanced these may be, including dialogue,