Goedele A. M. De Clerck presents cross-cultural comparative research that examines and documents where deaf flourishing occurs and how it can be advanced. She spotlights collective and dynamic resources of knowledge and learning; the coexistence of lived differences; social, linguistic, cultural, and psychological capital; and human potential and creativity.
       Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning argues for an inclusive approach to the intrinsic human diversity in society, education, and scholarship, and shows how emotions of hope, frustration, and humiliation contribute to the construction of identity and community. De Clerck also considers global to local dynamics in deaf identity, deaf culture, deaf education, and deaf empowerment. She presents empirical research through case studies of the emancipation processes for deaf people in Flanders (a region of Belgium), the United States (specifically, at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC), and the West African nation of Cameroon. These three settings illuminate different phases of emancipation in different contexts, and the research findings are integrated into a broader literature review and subjected to theoretical reflection.
       De Clerck’s anthropology of deaf flourishing draws from her critical application of the empowerment paradigm in settings of daily life, research, leadership, and community work, as she explores identity and well-being through an interdisciplinary lens. This work is centered around practices of signed storytelling and posits learning as the primary access and pathway to culture, identity, values, and change. Change driven by the learning process is considered an awakening—and through this awakening, the deaf community can gain hope, empowerment, and full citizenship. In this way, deaf people are allowed to shape their histories, and the result is the elevation of all aspects of deaf lives around the world.

A series of meditations on the relationship between theory and practice.

In the heated, often rancorous debates that are the “culture wars,” identity politics has been at the center of both popular and academic discussion. In this series of meditations on the relationship between theory and practice, R. Radhakrishnan probes the intersections of poststructuralism and postcoloniality that lie at the heart of contemporary controversies over identity and difference.

Diasporic Mediations records Radhakrishnan's attempt to make theory accountable to the world, even while eschewing narrow methodologies or “isms.” Rather than embracing one totalizing point of view, these essays move in the spaces “between” to establish a productive dialogue between different disciplines and critical practices-to elaborate what the author calls “common ground.” Considering issues of location, language, tradition, gender, ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, culture, and history, Radhakrishnan reclaims poststructuralism as a tool for both understanding postcolonial reality and working for social change. Diasporic location functions in this book as a perennially negotiated borderland-a real and symbolic space that adjudicates between solidarity and critique. Radhakrishnan's engagement with theory is always motivated by a desire both to build bridges with other communities of color and to engage in meaningful and constructive dialogue. He is particularly concerned with coalition, with overcoming compartmentalization and drawing fragmented movements together into if not a common cause, at least a common set of concerns. Radhakrishnan is adept at synthesizing current debates, reframing questions raised by them so that practical issues can be better understood. Momentous and wise, Diasporic Mediations provides thought-provoking considerations of contemporary issues surrounding identity, serving as a map of the postcolonial condition, or, in the author's words, of how to be “both past- and future-oriented within the history of the present.”Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan is professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In the heated, often rancorous debates that are the “culture wars,” identity politics has been at the center of both popular and academic discussion. In this series of meditations on the relationship between theory and practice, R. Radhakrishnan probes the intersections of poststructuralism and postcoloniality that lie at the heart of contemporary controversies over identity and difference.Diasporic Mediations records Radhakrishnan's attempt to make theory accountable to the world, even while eschewing narrow methodologies or “isms.” Rather than embracing one totalizing point of view, these essays move in the spaces “between” to establish a productive dialogue between different disciplines and critical practices-to elaborate what the author calls “common ground.” Considering issues of location, language, tradition, gender, ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, culture, and history, Radhakrishnan reclaims poststructuralism as a tool for both understanding postcolonial reality and working for social change. Momentous and wise, Diasporic Mediations provides thought-provoking considerations of contemporary issues surrounding identity, serving as a map of the postcolonial condition, or, in the author's words, of how to be “both past- and future-oriented within the history of the present.”

More than a decade after unification, Germany remains deeply divided. Following East and West German police officers on their patrols through the newly-united city of Berlin and observing how they make sense of one another in a fast-changing environment, Andreas Glaeser explains how East-West boundaries have been maintained by the interactions of institutions, practices, and cultural forms-including diverging patterns of understanding rooted in vastly different social systems, readily revived Cold War images, the continuing search for an adequate response to Germany's Nazi past, and the politics and organization of unification, which impose highly asymmetrical burdens on east and west. Glaeser also leverages his ethnography to develop an innovative approach to studying identity formation processes. Central to his theory is an emphasis on the exchange of identifications and the particular ways in which they are deployed and recognized in interpretations, narratives, and performances as parts of face-to-face encounters, political discourses, and organizational practices.