I have been writing, reading and thinking a lot about deaf diasporas. Definitely not for the faint of heart. Diaspora is more commonly associated with the Jewish exile to Babylon, where they hung up their lyres on willows and had to come up with songs to appease their captors. Deaf people have their diasporas scattered […]
A book arrived in time for Christmas, Peter McLaren’s Pedagogy of the Insurrection. I ordered this book because I wanted hope in the midst of Trumplandia and its outposts (yes, here in Canada). I could feel the need for hope rise in me like a weary dog waiting for his master. But I have also […]
Two thoughts from this week. A colleague wrote to me, “All ASL acquisition is atypical.” That made me pause. You see, I’ve been really frightened by Rachel Mayberry’s research finding that timing is everything when it comes to ASL language acquisition. That late language acquisition (ASL or English) makes it very difficult to acquire a […]
I can’t help but think that we Deaf adults are really missing the boat when it comes to our lobbying for ASL and deaf education. Equipped with our research, our life stories, videos, testimonies, we approach policy developers and educational administrators with irrefutable evidence that ASL is a viable, essential and required language in order […]
This was the week of black apes in heels, white baboons, and Deaf Crows. If it feels surreal, it was. The western world seems to be in a free fall with the white baboons at the bottom chortling away, thinking they have righted the ship, finally, once and for all. The black ape in heels […]
A line from a friend in an email continues to reverberate in my mind, a line that describes the mental state of a prospective Deaf student studying to become a teacher of the Deaf. In describing a certain program designed to train teachers, she writes: “in that program, the Deaf student would suffer PTSD” (post […]
As a Deaf person, I feel rather awkward on commenting on a musical score composed specifically for Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet which was aired Sunday night on October 16, 2016 at the Conexus Arts Centre in Regina, Saskatchewan. It doesn’t seem to matter that I can’t hear much with a profound hearing loss, I know when […]
I’ve been thinking hard about colonized parents of DHH children and youth. What I am about to write is not about a particular set of parents that I’ve encountered or even the parents that I’ve worked with. I have seen with my own eyes how much parents love their DHH child. Every DHH child […]
Stella* contacted me through Facebook. At first, I was disoriented in reading her message. Who was she? Then I immediately placed her. She was one of the deaf children growing up in a small town in a northern community. She considered herself hearing impaired or hard of hearing but certainly not deaf. I really couldn’t […]
So, here’s the thing. We divide the world into halves. We are on the one side of the half, the half that gets all the resources, recognition, power, technology and knowledge, and the other half has what? Not very much that we need to pay any attention to except stuff we can use for […]
Deaf Marginalia 
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