Between Sound & Silence: How Technology Is Changing Deafness

Op-Doc: For a generation of people with cochlear implants, technology is transforming the experience of deafness.

NEW YORK CITY -- For more than a generation now, cochlear implants have, for some, been transforming the experience of deafness. In this week’s Op-Doc , “Between Sound and Silence ,” director Irene Taylor Brodsky delves into conversation with a cohort of Deaf people living that transformation.

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Herself the child of Deaf parents and the mother of a Deaf son, Brodsky delves into a complex realm where deafness and hearing, rather than absolute states, are territories of human experience to be bridged and explored.

The full story with video at New York Times.

SOURCE - New York Times

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The Deaf Body in Public Space - NY Times

Deaf News: The Deaf Body in Public Space from New York Times.

NEW YORK CITY -- “It’s rude to point,” my friend told me from across the elementary-school cafeteria table. I grasped her words as I read them off her lips. She stared at my index finger, which I held raised in midair, gesturing toward a mutual classmate. “My mom said so.”

I was 6 or 7 years old, but I remember stopping with a jolt. Something inside me froze, too, went suddenly cold.

“I’m signing,” I said out loud. “That’s not rude.”

As the only Deaf student in my elementary school, I had already stumbled across the challenges of straddling two languages and two modes of communication. My family was hearing, but they still empowered me by using both English and sign language at home.

A sign language interpreter accompanied me throughout the day at school, and my teachers created a welcoming environment for me to learn, but finding a place to belong with kids my own age often felt more difficult. I tried to speak to them, and occasionally they reciprocated the effort by learning some basic signs. But usually I felt separate.

I went home that day and asked my mother about what my friend had said. “Don’t worry,” my mother said, “she doesn’t know the social rules are different with signing. You aren’t being rude.” With that, matter-of-fact as always, she brought the conversation to an end. But I still felt a lingering self-consciousness, entirely novel and difficult to shake.

This was perhaps the first time I realized that other people could see me as obtrusive, as taking up too much space, when I was simply communicating just as I was.

When I reflect on this memory two decades later, I recognize how my childhood friend, whom at the time I had found to be so accusatory, had really gaped at me with a sort of wonder. My signing challenged the rules of social conduct she’d absorbed from adults, and to her I must have seemed ignorant or radically rebellious, or perhaps both. But pointing was a truly fundamental act for me; it was how I expressed what my grown-up scholarly self would call relationality - the idea of being in the world in relation to others. Through sign language, a properly poised finger allowed me to say you and me and he and she and they. If I did not point, how could I make a human connection? ... Read More at New York Times.

Deaf People Fight To Be Heard - Lydia Callis

Lydia Callis, longtime advocate of Deaf Rights, won admirers as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s sign language.

NEW YORK CITY -- Lydia Callis wanted to get her mother a gym membership for Christmas last year. When she called to arrange a consultation, she mentioned that her mom (who lives in Arizona) is Deaf and would need a sign-language interpreter for the session. The health club said it would not provide a signer. Ms. Callis who became an Internet sensation during Hurricane Sandy as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s exuberant sign-language interpreter told the club that it was actually required by law to do so. Still it refused, and Ms. Callis, who was calling from Manhattan, gave up.

Last year was the 25th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and yet this kind of scenario plays out regularly for people who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing. While the broader culture has become accustomed to certain changes the law has engendered, particularly wheelchair access, the rights of the Deaf have frequently been misunderstood or simply disregarded.

Recently, however, a Deaf rights movement has begun to gain ground, particularly in New York.

One sign of this momentum has been a flurry of lawsuits. Last year, the city’s Department of Homeless Services settled a case that charged its shelters with failing to provide American Sign Language interpreters for Deaf residents, and a suit filed last summer in Westchester County claimed that two hospitals refused a Deaf couple’s requests for interpreters after the husband had a heart attack.

Another case involved Diana Williams, a Deaf woman from Staten Island who was arrested in 2011 and was denied a sign-language interpreter, as the federal law dictates. In October, the Police Department settled her lawsuit for $750,000. Her lawyers, from the Eisenberg & Baum Law Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing, said it was one of the biggest payouts of its kind.

“What’s disturbing about all these lawsuits is that the A.D.A. has been in effect for several decades,” Eric Baum, one of the firm’s founders, recently said. Mr. Baum said that his firm had litigated about 100 Deaf discrimination cases, roughly half in the New York metropolitan area, many dealing with a failure to provide interpreters. He was sitting in the Union Square office alongside the Law Center’s co-directors: Andrew Rozynski, a lawyer and fluent A.S.L. signer whose parents are deaf, and Sheryl Eisenberg-Michalowski, a Deaf rights liaison who was born Deaf...

Read more, HERE.

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