understanding deaf culture in search of deafhood

'I lived in a state of numbness with no thoughts as to what I could become,' he says. He withdrew from the world and buried himself in books. When he struggled to cope, he reasoned that he must be stupid. He recalls: 'I was told: 'You're not a deaf child - you're just a hearing child who can't hear'.' As one of the first deaf children in mainstream education, he was not taught to sign but forced to use his eyes and wits to work out what was going on.

'For Paddy Ladd - writer, academic and activist - school was a desperate strain. It is a positive approach to re-affirming Deaf people’s role and place in society, history and the world.ĭeafhood also focuses on the historical, cultural and linguistic reality of Deaf people, and maintains a larger worldview as opposed to minimizing the community into miserable (or glorified) individuals who seek access solely through hearing. The author illustrates the pitfalls which have been created for those communities by the medical concept of deafness and contrasts this with his new concept of deafhood, a process by which every deaf child, family and adult implicitly explains their existance in the world to themselves and each other.'ĭEAFHOOD is described as a journey that each Deaf person undertakes to discover his/her identity and purpose in this life as a Deaf person among other people. The book aims to assess the concepts of culture, on their own terms and in their many guises and to apply these to deaf communities. Within and outside deaf communities, there is a need for an account of the new concept of deaf culture, which enables readers to assess its place alongside work on other minority cultures and multilingual discourses. 'This text presents a Traveller's Guide to deaf culture, starting from the premise that deaf cultures have an important contribution to make to other academic disciplines, and human lives in general. His book ' Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood' was published in 2003.

Dr. Paddy Ladd is a Deaf scholar, author, activist and researcher of Deaf culture.

Understanding deaf culture in search of deafhood