DEAF space or the question of ‘what if’… June 1, 2011
Posted by Mike Gulliver in Musings.Tags: Deaf space, Deafhood, hansel bauman, popular theory, utopics
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A problem is looming that is going to only get bigger… Having spent the last 6 or 7 years exploring the way that members of a self-recognising DEAF community produce spaces for being… and called it ‘DEAF space’, another ‘Deaf space’ is emerging which means something different.
This puts me (or rather, my work) in rather an interesting position; I’m finding that my work is being redefined by a popular expression of something that’s not what I researched at all…
I have no desire at all to fight over the name…
Firstly… because I know where Deaf space has come from (the Gallaudet architecture project)… and I know the people involved (notably Hansel Bauman). I like Hansel and his work… I even shared a platform with him at the recent AAG in Seattle. His work is firmly part of Deaf geographies and he’s a contributor on the DEAF space blogs.
So… there’s no issue there of telling Hansel that his work is wrong… it’s not… it’s just different.
Second… I don’t really even know whether ‘DEAF space’ is the best label for what I’ve been researching… see the previous post on boundaries of DEAF space for more on that… (mind you, I don’t know whether ‘Deaf space’ is any good for what Hansel’s been looking at, but it’s as good a name as any other).
Finally… I’m not really sure that there should be a difference made… after all… all you have to do is look at DEAF space (as I’ve described it… as a space that allows DEAF people to ‘fully be’…) and extend the utopian side of my thinking to a point where DEAF people start to have control over their built environment… and you end up with a Deaf space.
However, I guess it’s the need to see that linear path of argument, and then to follow it back and forth in a number of directions… and wonder what happens when space veers off it suddenly that makes me uncomfortable… that’s the kind of mental game that academics like to play… but how relevant is it really to the DEAF community?
That’s where Paddy Ladd’s Deafhood is so good, for all its potential theoretical fragility… it is an easy to grasp concept that really carries weight and moves people to action (or internal evolution), even in a popular form…
Deaf space as Hansel’s working on it, in a popular form, looks pretty much like what it is… environment designed around a different way of being human… it’s not ‘accommodation’ or ‘access’, it’s the social model of disability flipped around and given to the DEAF community…
Whereas what I’ve been researching is actually a kind of DEAF utopics… and what I’m moving gradually towards is a utopic theory that not only encompasses DEAF space, but extends that to others who life their lives from within differently able physical bodies…ultimately problematising the ‘DEAF’ of ‘DEAF space’.
Perhaps I can continue to use DEAF space… but actually start referring to it as only a part of what I research, which is more a kind of multiply sensed, human ‘what if’…
What transformative power is there though, in something that is necessarily a thought experiment… ?
There’s no distance in a DEAF virtual space May 25, 2011
Posted by Mike Gulliver in Musings.Tags: activism, Deaf space, politics, speed, Virtual space
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Yesterday, I was writing to a friend in the US who also presented at the AAG in Seattle, and who is doing research on virtual spaces in gaming… her comment, in response to my question about her interest in connecting those virtual spaces and the DEAF community, is that she knows of little work that has specifically looked at the use of virtual space to mobilise a DEAF community, or Deaf politics.
The Italian bill episode is a good example of this kind of mobilisation. The Deaf activist site, Grumpy Old Deafies, that has been dormant since the 20th July last year when it published the outcome of the 2010 ICED meeting in Vancouver, exploded into life on the 21st May with information in LIS and English. There then followed information, petitions, postings in ISL (Irish sign), BSL, more LIS, DGS (German sign), letters to the Italian Government from academics in the UK and Ireland, responses from Deaf organisations in the UK and overseas, and new links to ongoing protests in the US…
This kind of mobilisation has been seen in the hearing world, using the Internet… but would have been completely unheard of in the DEAF community until recently.
Harvey’s shrinking world anyone…
Upon my return April 21, 2011
Posted by Mike Gulliver in Musings.Tags: AAG, Deaf space, IBG-RGS, numbers, Seattle
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Phew!
Time marches on… nearly a month after my past post, I’m back from the US where the first ever two-session treatment of DEAF space took pride of place at the American Association of Geographers conference.
… OK, not ‘pride of place’… maybe somewhere in the back of Thursday morning in the middle of the conference… but it was certainly the first ever big placement for DEAF space issues.
There’s a blog in the offing which will be shared here as soon as it’s set up, created by the people who contributed, as a way of bringing all the research on that subject together. And a further conference session on the same subject at the IBG-RGS in London in August/September… although I doubt the burritos at lunchtime will be quite as good.
In the meantime, it’s heartening to know that we are more than 1 or 2… and that we might be as many as a dozen worldwide looking into DEAF space areas…
Hoorah!
Stretching informatics June 2, 2010
Posted by Mike Gulliver in DEAF.Tags: built environment, DEAF, Deaf space, Gallaudet, informatics, visual
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My brother‘s been in touch… he works in informatics in Henley Business School. His particular interests are
- Social informatics and collaborative systems – computer-supported cooperative work, community systems, social networks, human-computer interaction, information retrieval, data mining, business intelligence, media informatics.
- Perceptual, Usability and Information Acquisition – Quantifying the perceptual impact of emerging technologies; human-centric data manipulation; eye-tracking and attentive displays, as well as intelligent systems and human-computer interaction.
All so much jargon?
OK… put it this way. At the moment… if you’re Deaf… all you get in terms of technology are things to ‘assist’ you in a predominently hearing world… things like vibrating pagers for fire alarms and flashing doorbells…
Imagine then if – instead of this – your predominently visual way of accessing information was simply another, equally valid way that wasn’t so much ‘catered for’ as simply ‘there’…
The significance of the shift is hard to make if you’ve not seen it in action… so here’s a taster from the world of architecture.
For the last three years, Hansel Bauman has been leading a project in Gallaudet, in the US, to define what a Deaf Archtecture might look like. The results of this are stunning… built spaces formed in the round rather than at angles, transparency and waist-high walls, inter-storey permeability, sign language-tailored walkways with no street furniture to bump into, polarising windows for privacy rather than doors… You can have a look at the blog that emerged here and at some of the feedback information in a magazine article here.
What’s key to this is allowing Deaf people to entirely re-imagine the role of the built environment in a way that originates within Dear people’s visual being-in-the-world as ‘People of the Eye’ (Veditz 1913), rather than taking a hearing-centred design and simply ‘adapting it’. ‘Deaf space’ as they’ve (somewhat confusingly) called it is not a ‘secondary’ space… but a space that is entirely valid… with a different point of origin.
So, what might this do to informatics if the same idea was applied? It’s hard isn’t it… we’re so used to text-oriented, linear-string information storage and retrieval… But imagine what the world of informatics might look like if it originated within the visual spaces of the Deaf community? A focus on visual communication quality? Control interfaces that leave the hands free? Circular and multi-entangled information storage and retrieval? Multicast communications to a linguistically flexible audience? Semiotic rather than text bookmarking?
I can’t begin to imagine what it might be like… but I’m looking forward to finding out!
