A decisive role for deaf epistemologies: analyzing power/knowledge in critical deaf pedagogy
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Abstract
In American Sign Language (ASL), Transgressing the Object IV (2012): Critical Pedagogy depicts deaf women engaging in cinematic critical theory. According to the video-text, transgressing conceptualizes inequities of power and knowledge in deaf education and documents educational interactions about audism (antideaf oppression), sexism, and intersectionality. The women construct individual and collectivist deaf epistemologies that comprise an egalitarian counternarrative depicting critical deaf pedagogy. To interpret these pluralist discourses, I explore a theoretical framework about Deaf Culture in teaching and deaf aesthetics in learning. By doing so, I generate three analytic findings: 1) how culturally-revitalizing deaf pedagogies are established, 2) how power/knowledge is shared in equitable heterarchies, and 3) the benefits of educational interactions with deaf aesthetics, classroom architecture, sign language metaphors, and embodied multimodality. Finally, I describe the decisive role of deaf epistemologies in critical deaf pedagogy and juxtapose my findings against a conceptual framework about deaf peoples self-determination and struggles for legitimation.
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