Deaf Flourishing 23
felt sense of inclusion and equality enabling them to participate as full citizens and
develop their own life trajectories? one challenge in responding to this is posed by
the ways in which societies are prepared to make room for difference and co-exist-
ing narratives. verhaeghe (2012) calls for an ethics of citizenship, for contributing
citizens, and for an Aristotelian sense of self-care and optimal realization, all of
which will lead to full membership and benefit the community.
The heterogeneity of the deaf/sign community is another challenge to identity,
empowerment, and development. Intersectionality needs to be taken into account
in the exploration and promotion of forms of deaf citizenship: Deaf people are also
children, women, Muslims, Africans, Asians, youth, people with disabilities, and so
on. Given this multiplicity of attributes, they will only be able live up to their poten-
tial in decent societies that enable all citizens to flourish.LIFE SToRIES AnD MULTIMEDIA
While the roots of signed storytelling go back centuries, deaf communities embraced
multimedia as soon as it became available and have been opportunistic in employing
it to promote signed languages, human rights, and access to information and enter-
tainment. This study has tried to capitalize on this utilization by adopting multimedia
as a vehicle for deaf people’s stories, which have often remained either in the margins
or completely untold. A selection of multimedia signed stories from Flanders, Camer-
oon, and Uganda are featured at http://www.signlanguageprojects.com/en.
In relation to Flanders, the documentary I’m a Human Being, Too (visualBox,
2012) presents an intergenerational chain of deaf lives (see Chapters 3 and 6), while
the video For Flemish Deaf Learners, a New Reality: Access to Interpreting from Kindergar-
ten to University (De Clerck & visualBox, 2013) provides a visual understanding of
the Un Convention through deaf parents’ advocacy for their deaf children. As was
mentioned earlier in this chapter, a new Flemish educational decree opened the
possibility of interpreting services for deaf learners from their very first enrollment
in kindergarten. The trailer “Flemish Deaf People Speak out!” (visualBox & De
Clerck, 2013) and the documentary Flemish Deaf Parliament (visualBox & De Clerck,
2014) provide complementary visual perspectives on the citizenship platform dis-
cussed in Chapter 6.
For Cameroon, a short non-professional video of the closing ceremony of the
WFD’s Deaf Human Rights and Capacity Building Training in yaounde offers read-
ers a glimpse of how this community uses dance and performance to innovatively
appropriate metaphors of awakening, in particular the African mama and the fruit
tree, enabling them to co-produce experiences of emancipation (see Chapter 5) and
negotiate their views on development (see Chapter 8, which concentrates on these
metaphors). For Uganda, the website presents a timeline of key moments in emanci-
pation, as well as “snapshot” videos of deaf Ugandans sharing personal experiences,
collective memories, and heritage-related performance (Kyambogo University
2015a, 2015b; see Chapter 8). These outputs all resulted from incredibly valuable
and vastly appreciated opportunities to collaborate with deaf community members,
deaf professionals, and deaf-led sign community media in these countries.