Abstract
This article focuses on the experience of signing deaf academics working in higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK. I utilise a research method previously unused in this context, eco-mapping, to explore the ways in which deaf academics see themselves and their involvement in their home HEIs and in the academic field more generally. I review the available literature of deaf academic experience in the UK before using extensive quotes from research interviews to illustrate how the burden of making their own workplaces accessible usually falls on the shoulders of deaf academics. I also show that there is a lack of appreciation of the emotional labour and time demands that such work requires from the academics’ workplaces using a Lefebvrian understanding of time. I end with some reflections on the method used and on the implications of the barriers deaf academics and those from other linguistic minority communities can face in HEIs in the UK.
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Notes
I use the term ‘signing deaf’ or simply ‘deaf’ in this article rather than the more traditional ‘Deaf’ to signal those who identify as culturally deaf and use sign languages as their first or preferred language. See Kusters et al. 2017 for more in depth discussion of this terminology.
I use ‘community’ and ‘communities’ in this paper as a shorthand for the sort of deaf groups/social gatherings/communal organisations that deaf people may be involved in. I am aware of the recent problematisation of the term ‘community’ in the field of Deaf Studies (see Kusters et al. 2017), but it remains the case that many deaf people still use the term to signal their loyalties and identities, as, indeed, participants in this project did. I retain it here for convenience and to follow the use made of the term by participants in this project.
I appreciate that the way I use ‘deaf’ and ‘hearing’ in this article presents them as monolithic concepts. Of course, there is huge variation within each of these concepts, such as race, gender, disability and so on. However, I am using these concepts in consciously essentialist ways, as this article is not the place to debate the variation within each.
All interviews for this project were conducted in BSL. Translations are the work of the author, who is deaf and bilingual in BSL and English, and have been checked and approved by participants.
Access to Work (or AtW) is a UK Government scheme which provides a grant to pay for extra costs incurred by disabled people in accessing the workplace. For deaf academics in the UK, this funding is often used for (but is not limited to) paying for BSL/English interpreters.
None of these academics had full time interpreter support. Some did have structured interpreter hours in that they organised their interpreters to be present in regular blocks of time each week. Others took a more ad hoc approach and booked interpreters as and when needed.
Thanks to Dr. Victoria Crawley for discussion on this point.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to the Society for Research into Higher Education for funding this research through their Newer Researcher Prize, 2017. My thanks to Dr. Maartje De Meulder for her insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Funding
This work was supported by the Society for Research into Higher Education under their Newer Researchers Prize 2017.
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O’Brien, D. Mapping deaf academic spaces. High Educ 80, 739–755 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00512-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00512-7