HESP420

There is a vibrant Deaf culture found within Deaf communities, including Deaf Persons of Color and Deaf-Disabled and Deaf-Blind. This course explores the politics of (dis)ability through the lens of the experience of d/Deafness. Disability--like virtually everything else--is socially constructed and mediated by societal norms and structures. As students will learn in this course, the American Deaf community sees itself as primarily defined not by the physiological condition of hearing loss, but rather by a common culture, even ethnicity, centered around a common language, American Sign Language (ASL). With the acknowledgment of signed languages worldwide as bona fide languages, the perception of Deaf people and their communities has evolved. This course will investigate the emergence of the Deaf community as a linguistic and cultural group in the United States, as well as issues that impact the provision of services to this population. This course will provide a brief introduction to various manual communication systems and philosophies and an introduction to the linguistic considerations of ASL, including aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.