Dr. Mike Gulliver "Living as if we already know what ‘human’ will be: Exploring the anticipated futures of visual/deaf humanity and how they shape the present"
Recorded by Dr. Mike Gulliver on November 20, 2019.
For audio description, please watch this video on YouDescribe at the following link (best with Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox): https://youdescribe.org/video/U7TdgiP_htY?ad=5ebebe592cd8455cc46256b7
Lecture Summary: 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’.
Dr. Mike Gulliver is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of History at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the present or historical situation of the Deaf community and draws on geography, utopian studies, linguistics, and translation studies.
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Resources and Further Reading
Speaker's Publications
Batterbury, Sarah, Paddy Ladd, and Mike Gulliver. “Sign Language Peoples as Indigenous Minorities: Implications for Research and Policy.” Environment and Planning 39, no. 12 (2007): 2899–2915.
Gulliver, Mike and William John Lyons. “Conceptualizing the Place of Deaf People in Ancient Israel: Suggestions from Deaf Space.” Journal of Biblical Literature 137, no. 3 (2018): 537–553.
Gulliver, Mike and Emily Fekete. “Deaf Geographies.” Journal of Cultural Geography 34, no. 2 (2017): 121–130.
Gulliver, Mike and Mary Kitzel. “Deaf Geographies.” The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia (2016): 451-453.
Gulliver, Mike. “Insulting Jean Massieu: Debating Representational Control of Deaf People in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain.” Cultural and Social History 14, no. 3 (2017): 321–342.
Gulliver, Mike. “La Persagotière, un espace sourd?” In 150 ans de La Persagotière. Nantes: La Persagotière, 2007.
Gulliver, Mike. “Places of Silence.” In Making Sense of Place edited by Frank Vanclay, Matthew Higgins, Adam Blackshaw. Adelaide: National Museum of Australia Press, 2008.
Gulliver, Mike. "Seeking Lefebvre’s Vécu in a “Deaf Space” Classroom." In Deterritorializing/Reterritorializing: Critical Geography of Educational Reform edited by Nancy Ares, Edward Buendía, and Robert Helfenbein, 99 107. Leiden: Brill Publisher, 2017.
Gulliver, Mike. “The Emergence of International Deaf Spaces in France from Desloges1779 to the Paris Congress of 1900.” In It's a Small World: International Deaf Spaces and Encounters edited by Michele Friedner and Annelies Kusters, 3-14. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2015.
Ladd, Paddy, Mike Gulliver, and Sarah Batterbury. “Re-Assessing Minority LanguageEmpowerment from a Deaf Perspective.” Deaf Worlds, 19 (2003): 6 - 32.
For more information on the speaker’s publications and projects click here.
Books and Sources
Asafu-Adjaye, John, Linus Blomqvist, Stewart Brand, Barry Brook, Ruth de Fries, Erle Ellis, Christopher Foreman, et al. “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” Ecomodernism, April 2015.
Bauman, H-Dirksen L., and Joseph J. Murray. Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
“Beneath the Lake” clip from Doctor Who.
Haraway, Donna. 1985. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review, 80 (1985): 65-108.
Mann, Charles C. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
Walsh, Michael. “Malady Mongers: How Drug Companies Sell Treatments By Inventing Diseases.” Huffpost, August 6, 2018.
People and Organizations
Glasgow Deaf Centre (now closed)
Liverpool Hope University Disability and Disciplines Conference, 2019
L’Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris or National Institute for Deaf Children of Paris (formerly National Deaf Institute of Paris).
Rochester Institute for Technology
The International Olympic Committee
University of Bristol Centre for Deaf Studies (now closed)