I’m going to get a cochlear implant, so peace for myself. epistemic injustice and deafness

Deaf and Disability Studies since their birth built a strong descriptive theoretical framework based on a dichotomy between a medical perspective of deafness and disability and a socio-cultural one. The literature in the field has developed from the first rigid definitions of deaf community and culture (Padden & Humphries, 1988) conceived parallelly to emerging sign language linguistics, to arrive at more mature phases of deconstruction and reconstruction of theoretical models on the social object of deafness (Friedner & Kusters, 2015; Kusters et al., 2017; Leigh, 2009) influenced by the broader processes of rethinking underway in the social sciences. Ethnographic research carried in the Global South (Kusters, 2009, 2015; Kusters & Hou, 2020) shed new light on how the experience of deafness is subject to human variability. However, field research do not always led to imagine new theoretical approaches that could take into account the interactions between macro and higher institutional views of deafness and the individual varieties of experiencing (social) reality through deafness. Since appears to be, in many societies, a disconnect between the production of services for deaf people and the requests from deaf people, it seems important to investigate how the different social representations of deafness function and determine phenomena of inclusion and exclusion, access or not to knowledge, communication, information. The demands of deaf people do not seem to have an impact, or do so very slowly, on the ways in which society frames and proposes inclusion. Resulting in the theorization of inclusion models and practices that does not always meet the requests of the deaf community. This contribution will try to highlight this discrepancy. Following some recent analysis applying epistemic injustice to disability (Cupples, 2020) and deaf studies (Burke, 2022; Robinson, 2022; Scully, 2018), in a broader social representations theory frame (Manchaiah et al., 2019) this presentation will explore how seeing deaf people experience through this conceptual lens could better unveil marginalized groups dynamics on inclusion, accessibility and access to knowledge. Raising awareness in a different way on these processes could hopefully help to understand and overcome stigmatization.