Deaf Flourishing 31
to address challenges in a deaf secondary school (again, see earlier in this chapter),
may provide inspiration. In his 2012 book What Money Can’t Buy, Sandel recom-
mends a public debate on the extension of market values to other domains of life
and the degeneration of values such as societal responsibility and solidarity that can-
not be bought but that are constitutive of the community. Sandel compares these
values to muscles that strengthen with regular exercise or atrophy from the absence
of it.
I argue for building the muscles of dialogue and partnership in deaf education
and encouraging informal sites of practice. Adriaenssens (2010, p. 145) observes
that “the choices of solidarity” [and...] “equal opportunities don’t come automati-
cally” (translation mine) to refer to the engagement required for this. Educational
contexts should provide young learners with opportunities to gradually learn to
deal with differences between people and develop empathic and dialogical capac-
ities. This enables them to achieve shared understandings that facilitate problem
solving in increasingly heterogeneous societies. The acquisition of these skills is
furthered by multilingual and intercultural educational practices in the arts and
humanities (De Clerck & Pinxten, 2012a; nussbaum, 2010; Wood & Landry, 2008).
Additionally, the partnerships and rights called for in the 2010 ICED statement
may be fostered by an epistemological perspective that approaches human beings
as insightful learners of language, culture, and values (De Clerck & Pinxten, 2012a).
In this vein, Jokinen (2013) situates the UnCRPD’s unprecedented protection of
deaf learners’ linguistic and cultural identity (article 24) within a framework of
sustainability, referring to the creation of reciprocal learning environments in a
“human ecology of languages, cultures, and literature” (for a critical discussion of
inclusion, universal design, and the UnCRPD, see Jokinen, 2016).
Such “inclusive universality” (Brems, 2001) is likely to be a major starting point
for further implementation of human rights and universal design frameworks. This
implies sensitivity to and representation of non-Western deaf worldviews. The learn-
ing processes in the associated shared trajectories and responsibilities refer to a re-
lational notion of citizenship (Pols, 2006). Similarly, in their sociopolitical approach
to the UnCRPD, Roose and Bouverne-De Bie (2007) emphasize the contextual-
ized negotiation and dialogical meaning-making that can start from a human rights
framework: “It is not so much that people are or are not citizens, but rather that cit-
izenship is ‘actualized’ in diverse activities and relationships” (p. 439). Pols (2006)
connects this idea with concepts of the “good life” (see earlier in this chapter).
This relational notion of citizenship offers a potential framework for an alter-
native to the old medical/sociocultural binary perspective. It may not only build
bridges among deaf/sign language communities, societies, and their service and
policy contexts, but may also help formulate solutions to sustainability challenges,
allowing for heterogeneity; intergenerational reciprocity; an inclusive outlook in
practices of learning, language, and literacy; and a relational perspective on moder-
nity and development.
Although disciplinary discussions of relational perspectives are sometimes critical
of the capabilities approach, these frameworks need not be incompatible. Robeyns
(2005) responds to these critiques of the capabilities approach by distinguishing