Essay #50: Dai O’Brien & Steve Emery, ‘Deaf People and Anarchism’

In this podcast, Dai and Steve discuss the issues that deaf people and deaf communities face in capitalist society and the ways in which deaf people have traditionally framed their engagement and resistance to these issues. We discuss the issues that anarchists need to consider when reflecting on how anarchist spaces can be more accessible to deaf people.

For a video of this talk in British Sign Language, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9_Z6nkFUqw For a text version, see the Anarchist Studies blog: https://anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/post/2023/01/16/anarchism-and-deaf-people/

Dai O’Brien is an Associate Professor in BSL and Deaf Studies in York St John University. His most recent papers are M Chua, Maartje De Meulder, Leah Geer, Jonathan Henner, Lynn Hou, Okan Kubus, Dai O’Brien and Octavian Robinson (2022) ‘1001 Small Victories: Deaf Academics and Imposter Syndrome’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education, and ‘Theorising the deaf body: using Lefebvre and Bourdieu to understand deaf spatial experience’ in Cultural Geographies. 

Steve is a Lecturer in BSL and Deaf Studies at York St John University. His most recent papers are: Emery, S. D., & Iyer, S. (2021) ‘Deaf migration through an intersectionality lens’. Disability & Society, 1-22; and Emery, S.D. (2016) 'Deaf Rights Activism, Global Protest', in G. Gertz & P. Boudreault (eds) The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia, SAGE: C.A., 266-271. He has written a joint chapter and contributed to the others in the forthcoming publication: Kusters, A., Moriarty Harrelson, E., Le-Marie, A., Iyer, S., Emery, S. D. (2023) International Deaf Mobilities. Gallaudet University Press: Washington D.C.

This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.

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