Deaf Studies celebrates its 30th year at Gallaudet

When Dr. Carolyn McCaskill, ’77, G-’79, & PhD ’05, thinks back to her time as an undergraduate at Gallaudet in the 1970s, she recognizes that there was a gaping hole in her education. “I never learned about myself as a deaf individual,” she says. “I learned about others – meaning the hearing world. But about deaf people? No!” 

McCaskill and other scholars changed that in 1994 with the creation of Gallaudet’s pioneering Deaf Studies program. This year marks its 30th anniversary, which will be celebrated with events and discussions throughout the academic year. It is also an important time to look back at its rich history and recognize the impact Deaf Studies has had at Gallaudet and beyond.

1994: the birth of the Deaf Studies Department at Gallaudet

Many people may not realize that Gallaudet was not home to the first Deaf Studies program in higher education. Boston University created one in 1980, and California State University at Northridge followed suit in 1983. At the time, some Gallaudet administrators were wary. Coming out of Deaf President Now (DPN), there was a sense of danger. Would this new program encourage future student dissent or active resistance?

But other factors were at play, explains Dr. Arlene B. Kelly, ’77 & G-’92 who points to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, and the appointment of President Dr. I. King Jordan, ’70 & H-’14, who was open to campus feedback. In 1994, the dream of a Deaf Studies department became a reality. “The time was just right,” McCaskill says. “People in the community were discussing what it means to be deaf. The community was really excited and there was a strong interest to see Deaf Studies established.” Deaf Studies had a natural home at Gallaudet. 

McCaskill served on the task force that worked to establish the Department, co-chaired by Drs. Yerker Andersson, ’60 & H-’98 and William C. Stokoe, H-’88. She recalls, “I was so in awe to be around all these leaders and I was so motivated to learn from them. I wanted to capture every moment and take it all in.” 

Early days of Deaf Studies

Starting up the program was not an easy task. At first, Deaf Studies was a department of one: Andersson, who was on loan from the Sociology Department. Dr. Benjamin J. Bahan, ’79, came on board as chair in 1996. Bahan came from Boston University’s Deaf Studies program, which had a range of course offerings. Gallaudet, at the time, just had one: “Introduction to Deaf Studies.” Other deaf-specific courses were scattered throughout the university.

“That was a challenge: I arrived excited to build a new department, and people were excited! But no department was willing to give Deaf Studies the courses they had traditionally taught. So we got together and said, ‘Let’s do something different here. Let’s dig in and find new topics that aren’t offered out there,’” recalls Bahan. He developed two cornerstone classes: “Dynamics of Oppression,” which is still a popular class taught today, and “Oral Traditions in the Deaf Community,” which he describes as a mixture of ASL and English literature, focused on traditional storytelling and literary performance carried down generationally. A seminal text important to the field was Journey into the Deaf World by Harlan Lane, Robert Hoffmeister, and Bahan, introduced in 1996.

By relying on each faculty member’s strengths, they uncovered information and developed new courses. “I got busy, rolled up my sleeves, asked everyone I could for assistance, and was able to find resources to set up a course on Black Deaf People studies in 1997,” McCaskill says. 

Kelly simultaneously worked to uncover and collect information for a course on Deaf Women’s studies, another long-ignored area. Kelly had a support network through Dr. Genie Gertz, ’92, who was teaching a deaf women’s studies class at CSUN at the time, as well as Vicki Hurwitz, who was teaching one at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at Rochester Institute of Technology. Both McCaskill’s and Kelly’s courses began as special topics courses, and they navigated uncharted territory together with their students. Now these two courses are required of Deaf Studies majors.

McCaskill and Kelly supported one another as they approached these daunting and exciting tasks. They both attribute their shared office space to a rich collaborative environment. Kelly recalls, “That’s where our thoughts really grew. We saw each other every day, we chatted, and worked as students came in and out of the space…we were both also Ph.D. students ourselves at the same time, and funny enough, we were in the same class as undergraduates and ended up working together in Deaf Studies for 27 years!”

Bahan shaped the spirit of those times when he decided: “Let’s rise to the challenge and DO IT. I was excited – it was an exciting time of discovery. More people joined the department, contributing their talents, and expanding and deepening our collective knowledge. You can’t compare this to any other university out there.” Watch more of Bahan’s recollections of those days in ASL here. 

Deaf Studies thought thrives

Dr. H-Dirksen Bauman joined Deaf Studies in 1999, and he remembers how new the material was to students at the time: “I wrote AUDISM on the chalkboard and asked the students to tell me what the word meant. Not one student knew, here at Gallaudet University!” Today, audism, coined by Tom Humphries in 1975, is not only a widely recognized term people know, but also a structure of oppression that students can put a name to before grappling with it. This heightened awareness spread through Gallaudet to reach a global audience partly due to Audism Unveiled, a film that began as a class project in the Dynamics of Oppression course in 2002, and was ultimately completed by Bauman, Bahan, and the late Facundo Montenegro.

Nearly a decade after its first year, the Deaf Studies department launched its master’s degree program, with concentrations over the years in cultural studies, history, sign language teaching, early language advocacy, and language and human rights. 

Through its graduate and undergraduate programs, Gallaudet’s Deaf Studies program has been responsible for a series of key academic contributions to the field. “In the 30 years of the department, we’ve helped shape public discourse about what it means to be deaf, to be hearing, to be hard of hearing,” Bauman says. “This department helped shape vocabulary, conceptual frameworks, and new paradigms.”

These efforts were spotlighted in July 2002, when Deaf Studies held a National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored Think Tank the week before Deaf Way II. Scholars gathered to write and exchange ideas, resulting in the landmark publication Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking. This volume featured original scholarship from 20 scholars on a wide range of foundational topics in the field.

More foundational theoretical concepts, now effortlessly incorporated into today’s academic discourse, were groundbreaking ideas born at Gallaudet. Bahan developed Sensory Orientation, the idea that cultures define their own values with regard to the use of their senses. Bahan and Bauman, along with architect Hansel Bauman and Deaf Studies graduate students created “Deaf Space,” a set of architectural principles centering deaf experiences. Dr. Joseph Murray and Bauman coined the term “Deaf Gain,” focusing on the benefits of deaf ways of being and signed languages. In addition to the seminal volume, Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity, this concept has been popularized in mainstream media. Dr. Octavian Robinson, ‘02 & G-’04 and the late Dr. Jonathan Henner analyzed linguistics through a disability lens to create Crip Linguistics, while Dr. Erin Moriarty used ethnographic film to explore unique ways Deaf people employ languaging strategies in transnational contexts.

McCaskill’s experience attending a segregated deaf school in Alabama led her to secure funding, along with Dr. Ceil Lucas and others, to conduct a study of Black ASL, one of the first instances of highlighting intersectional language and cultural diversity within deaf communities. This work led to the 2020 establishment of the Center for Black Deaf Studies (CBDS) which hosted the groundbreaking Black Deaf Studies Symposium in 2023. The event would not have been the success that it was without the visionary leadership of CBDS’s first scholar and researcher, Lindsay Dunn, ’85, who joined Deaf Studies in 2006. A leading advocate for diversifying and globalizing Deaf Studies, Dunn has furthered scholarship at the intersections of racism and audism. His courses on Black Deaf history and multicultural perspectives have challenged students to find solidarity and identification with the broader deaf global community.

Another instance of applied deaf studies has been the ongoing RISE collaboration between Dr. Gene Mirus, E-’92, with Swarthmore College to produce bilingual children’s books, with over 150 stories in 39 sign languages. 

In addition to these applied projects, Mx. Tawny Holmes Hlibok, ‘05 & G-’10, has long leveraged her background in law to advocate for human rights and language rights for deaf children.  Recently, she helped Gallaudet secure a prestigious federal grant to create the Beacon Center, which supports families with deaf children nationally. Gertz, who previously served as Dean of Arts and Sciences, co-edited the Deaf Studies Encylopedia in 2016 with Dr. Patrick Boudreault. The three-volume publication focuses on the rich language, history, and culture of deaf communities. Gertz then returned to Deaf Studies to work on a book-length project on Audism.

Gallaudet scholars and practitioners in Deaf Studies introduced these concepts not as esoteric theories, but as ways of describing realities grounded in, reflecting, and validating lived experience of deaf ways of being. 

What about the future of Deaf Studies?

Like all academic disciplines, Deaf Studies evolves. The Deaf Studies department won a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2023 to initiate the Deaf Studies Incubator, designed to diversify the program and to ensure that intersectional perspectives shape the future of the field. The program is in an exciting time of transition with the addition of three new faculty members this year: Dr. Joseph Hill, G-’04 & PhD ’11, Dr. Carla García-Fernández, ’92, and Nia Lazarus.

McCaskill says there is much more research to be done about BASL. She believes the field can become more inclusive of other intersectional identities. The inclusion of deaf people with multiple disabilities and exploring the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between deafness with disability is also important.

Hill recognizes the immense contribution of the scholars under whom he was first introduced to the field and says, “Their works are the inspiration for current and future academics who sustain the trajectory toward justice.” He also acknowledges the work to be done in broadening perspectives and recognizing harms, but is confident work will be done to “highlight the culturally sustaining practices to allow diversity to thrive in Deaf Studies.”

Lazarus is similarly passionate about discovering Black Deaf scholarship and centering marginalized narratives from people who have been overlooked in the past. “I envision the field of Deaf Studies will become more intersectional, recognizing people who do not conform to a traditionally white cis male frame. This is already happening with the hiring of instructors with such varied backgrounds,” she says.

Another significant step toward the greater recognition of diversity in Deaf Studies is the founding of Nuestra Casa, the Center for Latine Deaf Studies, with García-Fernández as the Director. This groundbreaking center will support scholarship from a Deaf Latine perspective and eventually offer a minor in Latine Deaf Studies. 

Bauman emphasizes the program’s huge responsibility to protect and value human diversity. “From the beginning, we’ve known that the deaf community faces many threats from educational, medical, and governmental institutions,” he says. “The main goal is to decrease the number of deaf people — to eradicate deafness. That threat has always existed, but now it has exponentially increased.” A new sense of urgency has emerged with the advent of genetic therapies that go beyond cochlear implants to literally make deaf people hearing.

Deaf Studies’ contributions on intellectual and political levels are clear, but cannot be underestimated on personal ones either. Bauman calls Deaf Studies the “heart center” of Gallaudet. “We really empower students. Many show up in the Deaf Studies 101 introductory course, having little or no idea about their own history. When they leave, they have more understanding about their identities and know that they are culturally DEAF,” Kelly explains. “I have seen and continue to believe that the impact of Deaf Studies is on discovering self-identity. I’ve seen many metaphorical light bulbs go off among students, especially those who were mainstreamed.”

McCaskill agrees: “I can’t imagine Gallaudet without Deaf Studies. Students want to know about themselves. And this helps them reinforce their idea of self. You can take a variety of classes, but what is there to learn about yourself? Deaf Studies gives people a sense of power as deaf people. We have intelligence and skills, so why not go on and do our thing and feel good about ourselves as deaf people?” 

Join the 30th anniversary celebrations

Deaf Studies welcomes you to celebrate these past 30 years through a series of exciting events all year long. Last week, renowned artist Christine Sun Kim delivered a powerful presentation about her work and experience promoting a Deaf Public Voice that calls on hearing people to listen more attentively. This week, celebrating International Week of Deaf People, began with an interactive presentation by Dr. Annelies Kusters on Language Portraits and a lecture by guest speaker Fabrice Bertin on French Deaf Protest Movements.

If you want to explore the future of Deaf Studies further, save the date for the program’s symposium, “Translating Deaf Studies into Action” on October 18 in the HMB Atrium, and be sure to check the School of Arts and Humanities MyGU page regularly for updates on many more fantastic events!