Viva voce

Interesting that although it’s called ‘viva voce’ [live voice] (and I admit that I did choose to speak), my viva was conducted in both speech and sign…  It makes me wonder whether we should look further down the list of definitions for voice… have a look at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/voice for example… numbers 1-5 are typical, but these are more interesting.

6 – something likened to speech as conveying impressions to the mind

8 – the right to present and receive consideration of one’s desires or opinions

It’s rather like the re-work of ’silence’ that I did a few years ago, where I defined silence not as a lack of sound, but as a lack of information presented in a form that can be perceived… ‘captured’… it’s interesting how well this links into Amartya Sen’s work on ‘Cap-abilities’… but that’s a post for another day.

Anyway, the viva went well… I’d like to thank Steve Emery and Mike Heffernan for the opportunity to discuss something that I’m passionate about for a whole three hours…  I am now Dr Gulliver (I’ve been reliably informed that I have the right to use it as soon as the decision is announced… and it’s proved to be remarkably useful in getting Mortgage Advisers  to take us seriously even though we have more-than-fragile incomes) and I begin the slow process of finding a full-time, long-term research position… not easy for a wide variety of reasons.

I’m currently working as a computer help-desker, with some additional research work at the Centre for Deaf Studies.

At the moment, a tenured lectureship seems a loooong way off.

A new academic’s quandry

Post submission, I’m in a bit of a quandry.

Essentially, the problem lies in how to disseminate the material that I’ve written for the PhD, in particular, how best to explore the concept of DEAF space. There’s a basic tension.

In the world of academia, it’s not a good idea to start talking about something that you’ve formulated unless you know that you’ve got ownership of the concept… ie: that you’ve published something peer reviewed (etc.) that explains it and that people will refer back to as the ‘first paper’ on the subject, you’ve got recognition from your academic peers for your work and so on…

However, not only is DEAF space not simply an academic concept, it’s not my academic concept, but one that belongs to the DEAF community. It’s an attempt to describe the very real, everyday life experience of DEAF people all over the world. So I don’t want to hold onto it and pretend that it’s mine, mine, mine… it’s not.

If there is a concept that’s mine… it’s probably the concept of a geography of (cap)ability… but even that’s a combination of several other people’s work… Lefebvre’s, Rob Imrie’s, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, Ben Bahan amongst others with a good dose of Paddy Ladd and others in there too…

So, on the one hand, for my academic future, I need to publish before really being able to openly exploring… And, on the other hand, I want to get the information out there as soon as I can so that DEAF people can start using it, thinking about it, taking ownership of it… and then I can work with them to explore it better and understand what it means to them.

Publishing for academic purposes is not an easy task… particularly since what you’re aiming to do is get as many papers out there as possible on different aspects of the concept. There’s no point writing one paper that skims the entire thing and having nothing left. So, ideally, you want to carve up the thesis and publish lots of detailed, but discrete papers.

However, that’s exactly what you want to avoid when you’re providing a guide for those who either want to start at a more basic level, or who aren’t (yet) interested in the theoretical academic background…

So, for better or worse, what I’m going to do is to blog bits and pieces up here at the same time as writing academic papers and also try to get as much of it out there in BSL as I can too…

Ideally I’m looking for a place to host a website without all the marketing that comes with freesites… anyone have space they can spare?

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.

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

Chapter one nearly done

It’s dragging on… but the end of chapter one is in sight. I had a meeting with my two new geography supervisors, Yvonne Whelan and Robert Mayhew on Tuesday and agreed a way forward for the PhD. I need to submit the first draft of the first chapter to them by next Friday… which is good as it’s beginning to go a bit stale… but working on it at home has been a lot more productive and it’s gradually getting there. With good health and a fair wind, things will now speed up and I will be able to advance a lot less sporadically than before.

So that’s one piece of news. Another is that I received a response from the office of the Prime Minister concerning the recent petition asking the PM to introduce the teaching of BSL in all schools. The wording of the petition was not altogether serious and, in an attempt to make it relevant to a hearing government, portrayed sign language as a more ‘funky’ alternative to spoken language to be used when there’s lots of noise about…

In the midst of this, the slightly offhand “Of course it would also make life easier for people who rely on sign language as their primary mode of non-written communication” didn’t seem to have a great deal of impact on the government despite over 5000 signatures.

However, the biggest problem with this is not that they rejected the request. After all, 5000 people out of 60 million is not a great majority. It’s the background assumptions and the tone of the response that is so hard to swallow.

So, for your pleasure, here is the response from number 10 with my response to their response inserted (note: I have tried to be as positive as possible. Faced with a goverment that is so two-faced that it turns my stomach it’s been hard, but I hope I’ve succeeded… maybe).

“We recognise the tremendous value of British Sign Language (BSL) in helping hard of hearing pupils throughout their educational careers.

OK, straight down to the nitty gritty. Come out and admit it. You still don’t really believe that BSL is a language do you? You still see it as a tool for broken hearing people. Do you want to see how this reads this through Deaf eyes? OK… try this:

“We recognise the tremendous value of Welsh and Gaelic in helping non-English pupils through their educational careers.” Patronising and insulting it’s it?

For a government that recognised BSL as a language in March 2003, you’re doing a pretty good job of misrepresenting it now. Gosh, any moment now someone will come out with the BSL-braille comparison and then we’ll be in serious trouble.

The National Curriculum, however, has been developed carefully over the years to provide young people with an entitlement to the essential knowledge and skills that will equip them for success in further education or training and in the world of work.

You know, thank you for this, it’s the first time that I actually realised that the National Curriculum was not about preparing children for life; only education and work. No wonder we’re in such a mess.

It is important that the National Curriculum should offer a broad and balanced education, but we must avoid over-prescription of what is taught and leave sufficient time and space for schools to personalise their offer to address individual needs and aptitudes.

No problem with that.

The balance we now have is the result of extensive consultation and trialling

Did your ‘extensive consultation’ involve any contact with the Deaf community. No. I didn’t think so.

but it is not fixed for all time and we will continue to monitor and review curriculum content at intervals to ensure that it still meets the needs of all young people.

Would it be useful to teach them a language that not only offers the possibility for international communication but enshrines a different way of thinking and a culture and history that is utterly unique in all of humanity and raises fundamental questions about the way that knowledge is constructed in Western society? Oh, that’s a shame, it’s the kind of thing I’d have found particularly valuable at school.

The secondary National Curriculum is currently being reviewed in order to reduce prescription still further and to create more freedom for teachers to use their professional judgement in designing subject curricula. Across the whole of our 14-19 reform agenda we are developing further opportunities for young people to exercise choice about what they study and how, with the introduction of diplomas, apprenticeships and so on. In this context, we do not feel it would be appropriate to introduce a new statutory requirement to teach British Sign Language in all schools.

Oh right, so the National ‘Curriculum’ is about to become less of a curriculum and more a loose gathering of subjects. In which case, there’s plenty of room in there for BSL, particularly as it’s actually far more immediately useful to most people in today’s society than… say… algebra. AND… you could teach it from a very early age so that it doesn’t even figure in the secondary National Curriculum. After all, you wouldn’t expect to start teaching kids to speak at the age of 11 would you? (oh, I forgot about other modern languages. Well, perhaps that’s why we’re bloody awful at those too)

It is also worth noting that the National Curriculum does not represent all the teaching that goes on in schools. Teachers are free to introduce other experiences and subjects if they wish to do so, as long as they are also meeting the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum.

Great!

The SEN and Disability Act, which was introduced in September 2002, means that more disabled children are now learning in mainstream schools, where that is what their parents want.

Hang on, we’re back to the Deaf=disabled issue again. No. That’s not what we’re arguing. BSL is a language. Deaf are a linguistic minority. Anyway, we’re not arguing about what to teach Deaf children here, we’re talking about teaching hearing children BSL.

This means that schools are developing a greater understanding of the needs of disabled people and in some schools this may well lead to teachers deciding to offer sign language to help ensure a child with a hearing impairment is fully included in school life.

Well, it’s nice to see you finally admit that 1. Deaf children are not fully included in school life, 2. This is a linguistic issue, and 3. That the problem would go away if you taught all hearing children in the school BSL. Oh. But you’ve said you’re not going to do that. (oh and PLEASE stop calling them children with a ‘hearing impairment’, unless you want them to refer to you as someone with a ’sign impairment’)

In conclusion therefore, it is right that schools should have the opportunity to teach BSL but we would not wish to specify that it must be taught to all pupils. We believe rather that this should remain a matter for schools to decide in view of their own local, and possibly more pressing, needs.”

Ah… and there’s the crux of it. Schools have more pressing needs than to try and teach their pupils about difference, equality and otherness and adequately ensure the integration of some 70,000 signing members of British Society.

Well, that’s OK. The schools are probably just following your example.

Moving on…

I think the key to having a blog is being prepared to deal with the question “Are you OK? I’ve been watching your blog and you’ve stopped writing.”

I have no objection to living this side of my working life in public. In some ways it’s reassuring to know that there is a safety-net of people out there concerned enough to ask how the author is doing… thank you
So, where have I been… well, I’ve been ill, Jo’s been ill… the whole of the UK is ill at the moment it seems… a lot of people asking me where I’ve been have also been ill… That’s a part of it, but it’s not really the only reason.

Here’s the core of it… i can’t write unless I’ve got acres of silence around me and the guarantee of knowing that I’m not going to be disturbed…

And, you know, I can’t do that at the university… unless I can develop superhuman concentration powers that allow me to just switch off the outside world…

I’ve tried various things… I’ve tried the ‘once a week’ rule where you do something if it only comes up once a week… which went to the ‘once a month’ rule and then the ‘once a year’ rule… there’s still too much stuff going on… I just can’t do it… Eventually, I’ve had to bite the bullet and cut myself off… and I’m now working at home.

The fact that I’m writing again here shows that it’s actually worked… I’ve got more done in the last three days that I did in the rest of the month!

But, where does this leave my other responsibilities; to be part of a living thriving community of academics either in Deaf Studies, or in Geography?

I guess the real answer to that is “I don’t know”… but what I do know is that there’s no set mould for this, and having tried pretty much everything else, I have had to admit that if I want to get the PhD finished before the end of the year, then this is what I have to do.

The scary thing is that I’m enjoying it!

5000 words…

The PhD has reached 5000 words. Not all will be kept I’m sure but it’s a start. I’m currently working my way through Pierre Desloges’ description of the Deaf Spaces of the Paris Deaf community in the 1770s. Very interesting and so much information there for those who thing that the Abbé de l’Epée or anyone else ‘invented’ sign language…

Anyway… just to bring together some other information on the Gallaudet situation, particularly following my response to Lennard Davis’ article in the Chronicle (see below). This time it’s I. King Jordan himself who, on the 22nd, published a letter in the Washington Post in which he treads the same line, condemning what he calls the “small but vocal group of deaf people who define the community narrowly”… these he calls the ‘absolutists’ and he argues that they are destroying the university’s inclusive vision of Gallaudet.

I’m not going to comment on the internal politics of Gallaudet. I’ve never been there and I don’t know the American situation very well. If you want reaction, there’s plenty here and here from Deaf and others in America. However, I think it’s worth tying the two articles together and commenting on what’s happening from an academic point of view.

Gallaudet is not a university – well, of course it’s a university, but it’s not just a university. It is possibly the most prominent symbol in the world of Deaf people’s ability to attain their full potential by creating a deaf-owned space and without having to assimilate into the hearing world and it has achieved this in the face of 200 years of worldwide Oralist oppression (I’m using all these terms despite, and perhaps because of the enormous emotional charge they carry). It’s a central landmark in the Deaf world; a representative pole that measures the tide of US (and world) Deaf identity.

Of course, not all Deaf people in the states can go to Gallaudet and not all Deaf in the states are represented by those who do… but then not all Native Americans have stood at Wounded Knee and not all Black people attended Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. But that doesn’t mean they are less Native American or Black… It’s what the place and events signify in the memory of the community that matters.

Unfortunately, what’s happened at Gallaudet is that the landmark status of the university in the Deaf community has not diminished, but the time for I. King Jordan and others to play a role in that representation is now over, and they won’t let go.

The Gallaudet ‘Deaf President Now‘ protests in 1988 were symbolic of a first step in Deaf people taking control of Gallaudet and so, of their own representation. At that time, the idea of a politically Deaf, ASL first-language user being elected was a non-starter… it just wasn’t going to happen and so Jordan was elected to the presidency to represent ‘d.e.a.f.’ America and their academic future. The grassroots, signing Deaf celebrated that, and looked forward to what his presidency would bring.

Now, nearly 30 years later, the boot is on the other foot, but instead of celebrating the successful empowerment of the Deaf community that came through his presidency and stepping out of the way to finally allow the grassroots Deaf community in the U.S. to rise up and take its rightful ownership of Gallaudet and what it represents (as other Deaf organisations are doing, see the BDA’s language ownership campaign in the U.K.) Jordan has proven once and for all that he, as a d.e.a.f. person, does not have the same mind as the Deaf community.

Post-colonial theory is full of this. Ahmad’s criticism of Fanon was that he was too ‘French’ and had got so used to using fancy philsophical theory that he couldn’t relate to the people any more; Fanon’s ‘Black skin, white masks’ is very much about that. In fact, the whole theoretical area of postcolonialism and development is about following those processes of territorial, representational, physical and mental colonisation and de-colonisation and what it is that happens when a colonised people want to take back responsibility for self-determination.

What Jordan has done is no great surprise. By writing his letter he has admitted that he can’t let go of the task of representing the d.e.a.f. community for right or wrong. He is clearly hurt because he doesn’t feel wanted any more and he’s even more hurt that the future that he planned for the d.e.a.f. community in America is not welcome within that community. To coin a well known phrase… the “Mask of Benevolence” has slipped, and all we can now see is the ugly face of bitterly jilted power.