Knowing by DEAF-Listening: Epistemologies & Ontologies Revealed in Song-Signing

Abstract

English speech and hearing are perceived by many in the UK population as the ways that people listen, learn and know. This often-invisible assumption quietly colours almost every element of social interaction – within schooling, health, governance, social care, or in art and entertainment. This article unpacks the ways that a particular kind of sensorial bias can become embedded in knowledge-making practices to the exclusion of other possibilities. Through deep-viewing of signed versions of ‘song-signing’ along with related online and offline debates, one can witness how language and listening rigidities are built into the architecture of British social behaviours and public systems. By ethnographically analysing face-to-face conversations alongside social media commentary, this article troubles deaf-hearing binaries, pursuing deaf authority which exists apart from hearing of any kind. Signed-songs emerge as a way to understand how visual-tactile listening shapes deaf-centred knowledge production, as well as how deaf epistemologies are valued by the majority population. Song-signs serve to foreground epistemic faultlines which often exist between English text-speech and British Sign Language (BSL), and are proposed as a way to understand epistemic dissonances between deaf and hearing ontologies, resulting in disconnects that may lead to epistemic injustices.