Geographies

Deaf geographies exist at the meeting point between Deaf Studies and human geography. They describe how society and social knowledge are built up as embodied humans encounter their environment and each other, produce interactive spaces through which they socialize and create/share knowledge, and then begin to shape those spaces into their environment. Deaf geographies treat all spaces as equal, and so represent a powerful critical tool that Deaf Studies can use to validate Deaf realities and explore the underlying power dynamics that shape environmental, social, cultural, and physical norms.

For over 200 years, commentators have been writing about deaf people’s unique relationship with space and each other by using geographical parallels. These have ranged from wondering what a deaf country might look like, through describing deaf people as a nation in their own right, or as foreigners in the hearing world, to the idea that deaf people might find a homeland in the semi-permanent spaces of Deaf schools and long-term deaf families.

For a long time, these were simply metaphors for a Deaf reality. Recently, however, these geographical parallels have been taken up by a group of academics working between Deaf Studies and the academic discipline of human geography. The result has been the emergence of a new subdiscipline: Deaf geographies. Deaf geographies not only represent a powerful critical tool that Deaf Studies can use to explore and explain Deaf realities, but also provide a bridge across which Deaf Studies and researchers with the Deaf community might travel to establish the unique value of Deaf Studies within more mainstream academic fields.

Until about 30 years ago, the idea of exploring a separate, but equally valid, Deaf geography would not have been possible within Human geography. Until that time, geographers saw the world as something fixed; a container containing people, living in places, with different cultures. Between those people and places was a lot of empty space. Geographers’ jobs, as they saw them, were to explore, measure, map, and describe that world, and to work to make it as accessible as possible to everyone.

In the 1970s, however, geographers began to realize that people do not live in empty space. Instead they live in a constant, rich interaction with their environment; harnessing it to their needs, shaping it through their actions, and being shaped by it. Not only that, but they live with other people who are doing the same, and who are both affected by them, and affect them in turn. This interactive production of spaces has been going on for as long as humanity has been in existence, gradually shaping societies and cultures, and creating things that are taken for granted, like buildings, and cities, and countries, and nations.

Most importantly, what this new human geography began to do was to establish the understanding that there could no longer be only one reality. After all, geographers argued, if the starting point for people’s experience of their world is their own experience of their surroundings, then since every individual inhabits a body that is at least slightly different from everyone else’s body, and has experiences that differ from other people’s, then everyone will—effectively—inhabit a different world.

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