Silent Life and Silent Language presents a fictionalized account of life at a Midwestern residential school for deaf students in the years following the Civil War. Based on the experiences of the author, who became deaf at the age of nine and entered a residential school when she was twelve, this historical work is remarkable and rare because it focuses on signing deaf women’s lives. One of only a few accounts written by deaf women in the 19th century, Silent Life and Silent Language gives a detailed description of daily life and learning at the Indiana Asylum for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb.

       Kate M. Farlow wrote this book with the goal of giving hearing parents hope that their deaf children would be able to lead happy and productive lives. She sought to raise awareness of the benefits of deaf schools and was an early advocate for the use of American Sign Language and of bilingual education. The Christian influence on the school and on the author is strongly present in her writing and reflects an important component of deaf education at the time. Descriptions of specific signs, games, ASL story nights, and other aspects of the signing community during the 1870s will be of interest to modern students and researchers in linguistics, deaf education, Deaf studies, and Deaf history. Farlow’s work reveals a sophisticated, early understanding of the importance of access to language, education, and community for deaf individuals.

In this landmark reader, Benjamin Fraser offers in five parts 44 Spanish documents dating from 1417 to the present, translated for the first time to trace the turbulent history of Deaf culture in Spain. Part I: The Birth of Oralism and Deafness as Metaphor illustrates the predominant impression of deafness as isolation, exemplified by Teresa de Cartagena writings in 1455-60 about deafness as an island. Part II: The Return to Deaf Education highlights writers who wished to restore “the Spanish ‘Art’” of educating deaf students. Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro wrote The Spanish School of Deafmutes, or Method of Teaching Them to Write and Speak the Spanish Language in 1795. Yet, Madrid’s Royal School for Deaf-Mutes, which opened in 1805, taught deaf students using methodical signs adopted from France’s Abbé de l’Epée.

Readings in Part III :The Contemporary Deaf Experience reveal considerations from the 1970s to the ‘90s of Deaf culture and linguistics similar to those in the United States, typified by the works of Inés Polo and Félix-Jesús Pinedo Peydró. The fourth part, The Recognition of Deaf Language and Culture, marks the expansion of academic research in Spain. María Angeles Rodríguez González spearheaded Spanish Sign Language (LSE) linguistics in 1992 with her publication Sign Language. The final part, A Selection of Deaf Poetry, concludes these documents with verse  in Spanish spoken dialects rather than LSE, indicating that the evolution of the Deaf experience in Spain continues on its own path today.

It’s a Small World explores the fascinating and, at times, controversial concept of DEAF-SAME (“I am deaf, you are deaf, and so we are the same”) and its influence on deaf spaces locally and globally. The editors and contributors focus on national and international encounters (e.g., conferences, sporting events, arts festivals, camps) and the role of political/economic power structures on deaf lives and the creation of deaf worlds. They also consider important questions about how deaf people negotiate DEAF-SAME and deaf difference, with particular attention to relations between deaf people in the global South (countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with access to fewer resources than other countries) and the global North (countries in Europe, along with Canada, the US, Australia, and several other nations with access to and often control of resources). 

 

       Editors Michele Friedner and Annelies Kusters and their contributors represent a variety of academic and professional fields, from anthropology and linguistics to cultural and religious studies. Each chapter in this original volume highlights a new perspective on the multiple intersections that occur between nationalities, cultures, languages, religions, races, genders, and identities. The text is organized into five sections—Gatherings, Language, Projects, Networks, and Visions. Taken all together, the 23 chapters in this book provide an understanding of how sameness and difference are powerful yet contested categories in deaf worlds.

“Don taught us how to be a real independent living center. Nothing was easy; every issue that came up on the road to Don’s independence was a challenge and a struggle, but the experience pushed us and we learned from it. We were not going to let Don down; all of us were committed to Don’s freedom and independence.”
—Kathleen Kleinman, Executive Director, TRPIL (Transitional Paths to Independent Living)
 
Profoundly deafened as an infant, Don Fulk didn’t learn his name or go to school until the age of ten. When he was eighteen years old and a budding superstar on his football and basketball teams, he broke his neck in a swimming accident, and became paralyzed. After his injury, he was confined to a bed in his parents’ home for eight years, unable to move and barely able to communicate. After his family could no longer care for him, he spent nine years in a nursing home where he suffered from abuse and neglect.

Yet through a life marred by isolation and frustration, Fulk endured with strength, humor, and grace. He never gave up pursuing his dreams for independence and self-worth, and improving the lives of others. He fought a system that was unfair and discriminatory, and helped pave the way for people with disabilities to live independently. Don Fulk signed his story to author Janet Allen, describing his difficult home life, the incredible friends who changed his life, and his dramatic escape from an abusive nursing home. An Invincible Spirit is a story of hope, empowerment, and the battles people with disabilities have fought—and continue to fight—to improve the quality of their lives.