Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
Disability Futurity – “Living as if we already know what ‘human’ will be: Exploring the anticipated futures of visual/deaf humanity and how they shape the present”
November 20, 2019 at 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM
Location: | 617 Southam Hall |
Audience: | Alumni, Anyone, Carleton Community, Current Students, Faculty, Media, Prospective Students, Staff, Staff and Faculty |
Key Contact: | Dr. Ryan Patterson |
Contact Email: | ryan.patterson@carleton.ca |
Living as if we already know what ‘human’ will be: Exploring the anticipated futures of visual/deaf humanity and how they shape the present
Dr. Mike Gulliver, Senior Research Associate, University of Bristol
The hope that “… [we] need not accept our limitations, but can transcend disability through technological innovation” (Herr 2014) is a key tenet of the Posthuman vision. For deaf people, this aspiration already shapes the present. With technologies to restore damaged hearing or prevent damage from occurring in the first place, commentators refer now to a ‘post-deaf’ reality (Davis 2008). A post-deaf world would be celebrated by many. However, for some deaf people—those who see themselves not as disabled, but as a ‘people of the eye’ (Veditz 1910), and who celebrate their natural, sign languages and their unique, signed cultures as the global heritage of a ‘visual form of humanity’ (Bahan 2011)—post-deafness represents not progress, but rather a narrowing of humanity towards a less diverse, less creative, less… ‘human’ future. Even as the idealism of post-deafness is challenged, however, its inevitability is already
being anticipated by present-day policy makers. As it becomes common to assume that technologies are now available to help deaf people choose to become ‘hearing and speaking’ people, alternatives to a post-deaf reality become more and more difficult to
imagine.
This seminar explores anticipated post-deafness, to uncover how future visions of disability (both real and imagined) shape the present, and the tension between our agency to keep the future open, and the inertia of the ‘inevitable’.
This seminar is part of the Disability Futurity series organised by the CCDS in collaboration with Carleton University’s Disability Research Group. The seminar presentation in Liverpool will be connected live by videoconference.
For information about Disability Futurity, please contact Professor David Bolt,
boltd@hope.ac.uk.
For information about the Carleton University event, please contact Dr. Ryan Patterson,
Ryan.Patterson@carleton.ca