Protestant ministers often construct their sermons around a text from the Bible that they expand upon to make some broader point. In the nineteenth century, public speakers frequently used the same rhetorical formula, taking their text not necessarily from the Bible but from any well-known source. In his famous Cooper Union speech of 1860, Abraham…

Historian Brian Greenwald offers a revisionist interpretation of Bell. He reviews Bell's role and influence within the American eugenics movement and shows that Bell had the respect of the most prominent American eugenicists. His intimate knowledge of deafness, from personal experience with his mother and wife and from his studies of deaf people…

Stokoe begins his seminal article in semantic phonology with complaints about the complexities of the sign phonologies that were emerging at the time. His insight was not just that phonology is somehow meaningful. Rather, semantic phonology suggests that language structures are built of components that are structurally identical to themselves:…

Codes of ethics exist for most professional associations whose members do research on, for, or with sign language communities. However, these ethical codes are silent regarding the need to frame research ethics from a cultural standpoint, an issue of particular salience for sign language communities. Scholars who write from the perspective of…

Grammars of signed languages tend to be based on grammars established for written languages, particularly the written language in use in the surrounding hearing community of a sign language. Such grammars presuppose categories of discrete elements which are combined into various sorts of structures. Recent analyses of signed languages go beyond…

This article argues that poetry written by nineteenth-century British and American deaf poets played an important role in the period's sign language debates. By placing the publication of this poetry in the context of public exhibitions of deaf students, I suggest that the poetry was mobilized to publicly defend the linguistic and intellectual…

The establishment of deaf education in the United States has traditionally been seen as the heroic act of one inspired hearing man, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. As Paddy Ladd writes in "Understanding Deaf Culture", this is the ""Grand Narrative," where Deaf communities are constructed solely as the individual end product of a lineage of distinguished…

In a letter addressed to Helen Keller, the author discusses the frustrations of being blind in the modern-day world. She reflects on the seeming pettiness of her complaints next to the difficulties Keller would have faced, especially given all of the new technologies and accommodations available to the blind. She wonders how Keller dealt with her…

In this article, the author discusses why it is difficult to transliterate American Sign Language (ASL) and the visual realities of a deaf individual's life into creative texts written in English. Even on the sentence level, she says, written English resists the unsettling presence of transliteration across modalities. A sign cannot be "said." If…

Johnston argues that the impact of science and technology on the Australian Deaf community threatens the viability of the community; this entails that the scientists have a moral duty to record and preserve Auslan for posterity. This response analyzes Johnston's moral imperative through the application of intrinsic and extrinsic values, suggesting…

This article discusses Johnston's estimate of the number of signing Deaf people in Australia and queries whether it adequately accounts for nonnative signers or reflects the numbers who make use of services in Auslan. It concurs with Johnston's projection of a decline in the size of this population, and discusses the ways in which the Deaf…

From the evidence Johnston has presented, it is clear that the number of children being born deaf in Australia has fallen off and that this decline is likely to continue as a result of the technological and social factors he outlines. It also seems that this reduction in numbers is reflected in other countries for which data are available. It is…

Responding to Johnston's projections for the future of Australian Sign Language (Auslan), I analyzed school enrollments in American educational programs and found similar trends. There are fewer deaf and hard of hearing children in school now than twenty years ago, with the largest decline, approximately 50 percent, among children with profound…

My response to Johnston's (2004) "W(h)ither the Deaf Community?" is theoretical in nature and sociological in perspective. I comment on how Johnston's particular concern for the possible demise of Australian Sign Language (Auslan) in Australia's currently transforming social and medical context surrounding childhood deafness is legitimate but…

Inspired by Johnston's thought-provoking article, this article reports from the current Norwegian scene to make two main points. First, Norwegian Sign Language paradoxically appears to be better protected as well as more threatened than ever. Second, success in bilingual deaf education is not logically incompatible with a placement primarily in…