The long-distance writer

To my shame, I’ve not read it, but my friend and colleague Steve Emery has published a paper on the challenges of the “long-distance post-graduate student” Emery (2007) see here. My guess is that he found similar things to me… besides the challenges of trying to get what you need from an unfamiliar library with a limited borrowing allowance (thank goodness for electronic journals, that’s all I can say), the biggest issues for me are simply keeping in touch with an understanding of the level of writing that the PhD expects and getting responses from people fast enough.

About a month before Easter I was well on the way to getting the first drafts for everything in… I’d written all the first drafts of the data chapters, had them checked, and I was about to go onto the theory… the idea was to get that in by easter, have a few days off, and then get on with the editing…

Then one supervisor went on study leave, and the other came back from study leave, requesting that I get all the editing done before they looked at the chapters.

Not a problem… after all, it’s all got to be done at some point… the only thing is that out of contact with others doing the same thing, and out of touch with the most recent trends in your field (it’s just inevitable if you’re 150 miles from the office and you can’t go in more than once a month!) every time you send a revised chapter, there’s that horrible moment of waiting for an acknowledgement, and then the comments, and then the realisation of what more needs to be done…and the feeling that you’re slowly drifting away from the target, whilst the deadline looms ever closer.

And all the time there is a feeling that my writing is not as good as the stuff that I’m reading… and no reassurance that that’s OK because I’m still only a PhD student…

So now it’s past Easter, and all the revised data chapters are in… but I’m no closer to knowing if they’re gooed enough… and the theory still has to be written…

web presence

Sure, it’s probably therapeutic to write… maybe for its own sake, but what is the point, really, if no-one is going to read it.

Having transfered attentions to a blogspot blog for the last few weeks, searching for myself on the web (only prompted, I assure you, by the fact that I was told that other people were looking for me) I found that the blogspot blog didn’t register with google at all… consequently, despite the fact that I still can’t work out how to change the password on this one so that I can remember it, I’ll be coming back here.

The point of having a blog, after all, is to use it and be seen using it… surely!

Just about submitted the second revisions of all four data chapters… there’s some real meat in their, hopefully I’ll take the time to outline some of it at a later date.

Only the theory to go now *gulp* and only a couple of months to get it written, polished and handed in.

Be glad when it’s over now

P.S… Have changed the password… phew!! How complicated is the dashboard on this thing?

Hmm

Yes, well… that commitment to keep this updated didn’t last long now did it!!

Still… quick note… more information and a paper uploaded to my profile on academia.edu site. The paper is pretty basic, a re-examination of Milan through a more spatial lens, but for those who haven’t read anything that I’ve written, it’s a start.

Second data chapter going to review today, so on to the third on Monday… article to review for Deaf Worlds later today and some fascinating thoughts on the distinction between deaf, Deaf and DEAF from a friend of mine at Bristol which I hope we we will be able to publish when we’ve had a chance to chew it through some more.

Also check out Annelies’ blog on her work on Ghana at naarengelandvaren.blogspot.com

Happy weekend.

Beginning again… again

Having finally finished with moving, holidays and faced with Jo’s departure to work at Nottingham Hospital… I’m back to work on the PhD… and endeavouring to keep this blog updated on a more regular basis…

Whether the aim of writing more often will actually come to anything is another question entirely… but since I have a blog, I ought to at least write something in it!

The first day or two back will be taken up with admin… there is a summer’s worth of e-mail to clear and a few household tasks that need to be sorted out… but as soon as that is done then I have two papers to write to present at the upcoming ‘Signs of God’ conference… I’ll publish them here once they’re done.

Watch this space… no-one will be more surprised than me if I actually do manage to get something consistent written here!

Milan again?

Looking through the media coverage of the HFAE bill, have you noticed how much it mirrors the debates of the congress of Milan in 1880? In fact, it’s revealing how many of the assumptions undergirding the current proposal are the same… and frustrating that little impact seems to be made by challenging them.

Clause 14 (4) (9)

“Persons or embryos that are known to have a gene, chromosome or mitochondrion abnormality
involving a significant risk that a person with the abnormality will have or develop -
(a) a serious physical or mental disability,
(b) a serious illness, or
(c) any other serious medical condition,
must not be preferred to those that are not known to have such an abnormality.”

That appears fairly clear to me. If you define deafness as a serious physical disability, and you can identity its cause within the genome as an abnormality… then those persons or embryos identified as having those genes or combinations of genes, will be excluded by law from donating eggs or sperm, and/or disregarded as viable embryos before implantation.

But it leaves me with more questions than answers.

1. Academic… What constitutes a serious disability? Where are its origins? What of D/deaf people’s well charted difficulty in locating themselves within a binary disabled/non-disabled model? What about disability studies’ location of the responsibility for dis-abling in the environment and society? What about Deaf people’s cultural/linguistic model? How about previous assumptions concerning the inherent inadequacy of Black people, Jews or Women? What about hearing people in Deaf-authored spaces?

2. Moral… Why does this Bill have a ‘corrective’ ingredient? How is it formulated? Who’s version of ‘better’ humanity is preferred? What happens as our morals change evolve in the future? Who gives the right to intervene to prevent an ‘abnormality’ being passed on?

3. Scientific… Can we guarantee the knowledge that we have on genetics? Do we know for certain that disabilities will result from specific genes or gene combinations? Does that information really inform our knowledge of who and what is ‘happier’ or ‘better’ or is ‘health’ just a question of genetic Sudoku played with no moral ingredient?

4. Legal… How does this stack up against human rights legislation? What facilities are there for legal challenge and accountability? Where does this sit within current abortion debates? (or those concerning differing ages for disabled births?)

5. Social… Do you stop here, or do you eradicate the ‘addiction gene’, or the ‘obesity gene’ or the ‘gay gene’, or (in our warming world) the ‘fair-skinned gene’? In a country where, last week, a girl was beaten to death because she looked different, what does this clause say about welcoming diversity and the disposability of those who are ‘other’? Will we see Deaf people travelling abroad to find reproductive freedom?

6. Epistemological… What about Deaf people’s take? What does their reality (realities) look like? Why is that being ignored? Why are Deaf people being subjectified into bodies by rather than empowered as people? Why is Deaf well-being being ignored?

All of these are serious areas that arise from this one clause, and all are areas that are shut down at a stroke by those who refuse the debate.

The HFAE bill threatens to destroy more than just embryos that it judges invalid… it threatens to destroy the ability to hear what Deaf people have to say.

The lie of ‘of course deaf is wrong’

Regarding Hilary Freeman’s article in the Daily Mail, I have had two notes from Deaf people saying that their comments in the Mail and the Times have been suppressed… yes… not all of my comments have been published either… they reserve the right to do that… handy isn’t it?

However, anyone with access to the original Mail article (does anyone know if they have to keep them on file?) will see that the present incarnation has been substantially altered and wording changed, particularly where they make factual errors or misrepresent people who have then been prepared to threaten them with legal action.

What Freeman’s article now appears to be in a more personal account of her experience growing up with a deaf younger brother. It’s a typical story of family grief and environmental adaptation, ad-hoc interpretation and coping with hearing-centred conformism, of linguistic and pathological confusion and frustration… It’s such a world away from the kind of interactive, loving and accepting upbringing that Tomato and Paula will be giving their daughter that it infuriates me to see comments on some of the sites condemning them for being terrible parents… How can a Deaf person be a terrible parent when the love and nurture their children, and hearing people be good parents when they force their deaf children to struggle to communicate even within their own family?

So, all I would say to Freeman now is… you’re not alone… Sadly your story reflects the experiences of thousands of those who have deaf children, deaf siblings or who are deaf… and who have been told right from the outset that ‘deaf’ is wrong and curable, and that only ‘hearing’ is acceptable. Unfortunately, this is a lie… and a damaging one because of the way that it attributes the success or failure of the transition from deaf to hearing to the child’s own efforts and the efforts of their family, and heaps condemnation upon those who don’t succeed in becoming sufficiently hearing.

Note: I’m not denying here that physical deafness is the lack of a physical sense… and I’m not denying that the hearing world is built around sound-based language… and so I’m not denying that those who either cannot hear or who cannot speak are disabled in their interactions with the hearing world by hearing society itself… Rather, I’m arguing that this does not directly attribute disability to the person themselves… why should “all five senses” be in working order before classifying that person as whole?

Why not, instead, accept Deaf people’s natural orientation as visual people and their authoring of natural visual sign languages and celebrate the amazing potential for human diversity that this demonstrates. Why not work to broaden humanity rather than limit it by setting up a straw man of hearing-based disability and then knocking it down by eradication of the ‘deaf gene’. Why not look at what this does to the limits between disability and ‘hearing’ and ‘Deaf’ as cultural constructs rather than inherently physical categories…

If journalists are to do their jobs, they must overcome their own personal angst and engage with both (multiple) sides of the story. Read accounts of people who have been through the same struggles both Deaf and hearing. Contact the British Deaf Association and NOT the RNID (the latter also have to represent the views of hard of hearing people who grew up in the hearing world and so can’t exclusively represent Deaf people). Contact Deaf academics Dr Steve Emery and Dr Paddy Ladd. Contact Tomato and Paula directly. Contact specific university departments who work investigating Deaf knowledges. Contact Deaf community activists; the people at www.stopeugenics.org, those at www.grumpyoldeafies.com. Consult Deaf-owned blogs currently commenting on the same area. feel free to ask me too if it’ll help, but I’m not Deaf and I’ll only point you those who are).

Listen to what they say, wrestle with the diversity of Deaf opinion, think about it, digest it, understand it… and then tell people about it… but don’t simply discount it as wrong or invalid.

For a more balanced approach from someone who more appreciates the Deaf side of the story more, look at the Independent’s Dominic Lawson here.

A plea to the press on Clause 14 (HFAE Bill)

I know it sells papers… gets ratings… draws crowds… and there’s nothing better than a bloodfest to get the juices flowing… but this (highlights added)

“Concepts of equality and parental choice sit uneasily when the result means deliberately creating a baby with a disability…” (Moral Maze)

and this

“Unlike the couple who are currently fighting for the right to ensure they have a deaf child through IVF… ” (Daily Mail)

Is plain mis-representation.

The question is not a case of preferring a deaf embryo over a hearing one… It is simply a case of NOT aborting a fetus that is deaf, deselecting a gamete that might be deaf, or rejecting a donor who might carry a ‘deaf gene’.

Dear press… Can you not see the debate is not about Deaf people engineering-in deafness, but about those with some kind of authority based in public acceptance and submission deciding to reject human beings based solely on their ability to hear and on the disadvantages that they might inevitably ’suffer’ living in a society that has consummately failed to understand them.

Dear press… you have been sucked in… and you’re playing their game… and you’re lending them the support upon which their fragile authority continues to thrive.

For 200 years and more, Deaf people have been fighting to try and explain themselves to those same authorities who have single-mindedly refused to allow Deaf people to present their point of view without being talked-over, interpreted, re-presented or explained away.

And now, as we watch, it is happening all over again… rather than entertain a challenge to what is considered normal, healthy, whole… and perhaps discover themselves prejudiced, bigoted and less than the liberals that they would wish to be they would rather silence opposition to their control of what is considered ‘normal’ by eradicating them at their point of origin (ironically, to save them from a terrible disability)… or silencing them and not allowing them to speak.

Please don’t play their game by granting them the moral high ground… please join in forcing them to explain themselves.

Who is it really playing God?

Response to John Humphries

I’ve been spurred back to writing by yesterday’s response to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill by Tomato Lichy and Paula Garfield on Radios 2 and 4… and particularly by the responses from John Humphries who demonstrates perfectly the cross-purposes at which people are arguing.

The issue of Clause 14 is hotly debated elsewhere and I don’t want to add my voice to the mêlée… Rather, I’d like to suggest that the problem be considered on a different level… one that unfortunately gets swamped by the (very real) necessity for urgent political action, the lack of time available to opponents of a process that moves quickly and the pressure to achieve an end goal… but one that, in my view, warrants a move from the entire academic community to prevent an initiative that threatens to destroy our access to knowledges that differ from those of the temporarily approved set of ‘Truth’.

Humphries’ responses in the Radio 4 exchange with Tomato clearly demonstrate the problem. He cannot perceive of deafness being anything other than a disability… and sign language, or sign language-mediated knowledges, being anything other than a compensatory system for those who cannot hear… consequently, his perception of what might be the ‘right choice’ is limited to the one that appears ethnically inevitable.

Consequently, as Tomato (and Paula too in the exchange with Jeremy Vine) assert Deaf culture and language, the non-disablement of Deaf people, the dis-abling of hearing people in Deaf spaces and so on… it makes no impact on Humphries’ single-minded assumption that there is only one reality… his own.

I don’t want to argue epistemologies or ontologies etc. head on. It has no impact on people who are that stuck inside one knowledge system. So let’s start a different way, by embarking on a ‘make believe’.

In 2003, the British Government finally accepted the linguistic evidence that BSL is a language in its own right (note: they did not accept BSL as an official language of the UK, nor did the government in its entirely participate in the validation, only the department of work and pensions did… and only within the remit of disability provision… so there is a whole lot more work to do yet). By so doing, they accepted that BSL (and therefore other natural sign languages, that’s another debate) is fully able to mediate human linguistic and cognitive development.

Let’s dial back then to the point in time where humankind developed language. What if, at that point, instead of adopting speech, they had adopted the perfectly viable alternative: sign language. There’s evidence that some might have done, and indeed nothing within the language to stop it from happening, and there’s nothing inherent within the decision to make it any less viable or likely than the current status quo.

And it’s here that the problem lies. If we accept that this is a possible scenario (and we must given the evidence) then the ‘only-ness’ of the world in which we live is challenged. If it is entirely possible that the world might have developed based on sign language-mediated intervention, then neither spoken-language culture and society nor sign-mediated culture and society is inherently ‘better’ than the other… simply different… equally validly ‘other’… complimentary… distinctive of human creativity… maybe even prone to different creative expressions and holistic mediations of what it means to be ‘human’…

And this is what Deaf people argue. They do not merely equate their sign language with deafness. Presented not only as a language through which Deaf people find their full humanity, but as a full, other form of communication that embodies the body/world relationship far more holistically than does linear spoken language, Deaf people have suggested that their ‘other’ knowledges are a compliment to the hearing-authored world.

OK… I know there is the reality of history and the current situation to consider (but most of that is a ridiculous worry about Deaf people not being able to hear traffic and suchlike), and I know that the political situation of the Deaf community has made it less than easy to extricate emotion, argument, anger, resentment, reactionism and so on. But what would happen if instead of seeing this debate as one in which Deaf people are (mistakenly) accused of trying to deliberately disable their future children, we flipped the debate on its head and looked at the issue of Clause 14 as symbolic of ways of exploring and celebrating the variety of what we consider fully ‘human’ instead of attempting to wield a 200 year-old, paternalistic, scientifically-informed scalpel to distinguish between those considered valid and those who are not.

Not so long ago Black people were also considered inferior… and so were gay people… and so were Jews… and so were women… And yet by embracing their knowledges, knowledge itself has been transformed… How much more than could Deaf people bring to the sum of human knowledge if they were allowed to express themselves without immediate prejudice.

It is time, now, to embrace the challenge of Deaf people’s physical, cultural, perceptual, linguistic, ontological otherness.

All the eradication of Deaf people and Deaf knowledges achieves is the impoverishment of humanity as a whole.

Ten days to go… and counting :)

Dear all,

For those of you unaware of what’s going on in my life, I’m getting married on the 1st September to a lovely lady called Jo… To anyone in a similar situation… do it… don’t even hestitate (BTW… congratulations to Olivier who has just got engaged )… although you might want to talk to your intended about the time that it will add onto completing your PhD, particularly if you are limited in time and funding… which we are… but that’s another question.

So, this week is a final week of trying to get as much done on empirial chapter three as possible so that I can hand it in to Paddy, Yvonne and Robert and let them read it whilst we’re doing last-minute preparation and then enjoying a well earned holiday and sorting out the move into our new flat in Cardiff.

And, lo and behold, up pops an interesting question from the writing… which is what do you do when the Deaf community pretty much re-makes theory as it’s perceived by the rest of the academic world?

You see, Deaf people in their daily interactions are only partially reached by movements and discourses that colour the hearing world… Spaces and places, essentialism and anti-essentialism, phalocentrism, feminism, nationalism… all of these theories that are built based on hearing world events, discourses and discussions… on the way that the hearing world works. Instead, because Deaf people primarily live and move in a world of knowledge mediated by sign language and by visual information (not the same as writing… but that’s another question too)… they naturally respond to human and social behaviours to come up with entirely different shaped concepts. Porous and inclusive nationalism… holistic and necessary essentialism… person-based spaces… ‘placeless’ spaces…

I’m supervising an MSc thesis at the moment on the parallels between feminism and Deaf theory… and it’s very revealing to see the way that Deaf people’s thought simply explodes the boundaries of essentialism, becoming, biological determinism and so on in a way that is not with feminism… and is certainly not against feminism… but is simply Other to feminist theory that is, whether we like it or not, primarily still formulated as a challenge to dominant, phalocentric theory…

On the other hand Deaf theory, at least non-adversarial Deaf theory (theory that’s not challenging something like Oralism) is simply authored by Deaf people within the Deaf community… Consequently, it develops in its own direction and then surfaces fully formed to challenge hearing knowledges… Thus, for example, there is no need to challenge a fixed (but also constantly evolving) biological determinism, or becoming, or essentialism since all are in some way necessary to the evolution of the Deaf community… neither one, nor the other… but both at the time are enemies and friends at the same time.

Kat, who’s writing the thesis, and myself are hoping to publish some of this at a later date… However, dropping it into a tradition that is already pretty adversarial might not be enormously comfortable and it’ll be interesting to see what reaction it brings.

Tips

This is a very functional post… following on from a skills training session last week with Jenny Beddoes of the Kudos Group. It was particularly useful on CVs and interviews (although not so much for academic applications but then that’s not Jenny’s area of expertise) and for time management tips. Having got to the third year of the PhD without it going completely wrong so far, I thought I’d share a couple of tips that I’ve learned along the way.

1. Write something everyday, even if it’s just a ten word précis of the chapter you’ve read, or what you’ve done. It’s not so much for the material, although that will be useful later on, but for the practice. I didn’t really write anything significant for the first two years of the PdD and when I sat down to start the writing I wished I’d had more practice (and I also wished that I had a set of more or less detailed notes and personal dialogue to work with).
- Read a paper, summarise it into Word or endnote or something with page numbers noted for particularly useful material.
- Read books at the computer and note anything that you find interesting… at the end of each chapter, summarise it and then write 50 words on how it fits into your thinking about your own subject… I’ve given up using paper and a pen, you can’t search it for words like you can on a PC.
- When you’ve finished a particular set of reading, write something about how it’s good or not… or you diagree or not (the only successful piece I did was actually a comparison of Heterotopias from Foucault, Hetherington and Marin).

2. Do everything properly the first time. I remember noting a quote from somewhere for my Masters dissertation and then wanting it for the final copy and taking a day to find it because I didn’t write down where it came from. Now, even if it’s only a quote or a note of a book subject or something, I take the time to write the full reference so that I don’t even need to go back to the book and look it up again. I guess the same could apply to organising photocopies, labelling CDs, filing historical notes etc. If you do it right the first time, you’ll save frustration later.

3. Be ruthless with time. I work at home Monday to Thursday writing. Friday, I’m at university doing admin, reading papers and new material and seeing people… although my tendency is also to be a bit reclusive so that won’t work for everyone… and I need to work on spending time with both Deaf Studies and Geography people (and I’m only really achieving the former at the moment). Also with tasks… I try to do about half an hour of e-mailing in the morning and then only look at them at lunchtime and at the end of the day. Home admin, expenses, going to the post-office, reading students’ notes, phonecalls, centre-meetings, voluntary activities etc. I try to put them all onto Fridays and do them before they get urgent and break into other days’ work.

4. Preparation time is not wasted when you’re writing. I’ve found that diving straight in to writing loses me time. Instead, it’s better for me to spend a few days preparing and sorting and organising and structuring. Then, I can start to write without having to stop and re-write it all when it’s gone off track.

Anyway… that’s it…

XX