Deaf people who form part of a Deaf community communicate using a shared sign language. When meeting people from another language community, they can fall back on a flexible and highly context-dependent form of communication calledinternational sign, in which shared elements from their own sign languages and elements of shared spoken languages are combined with pantomimic elements. Together with the fact that there are few shared sign languages, this leads to a very different global language situation for deaf people as compared to the situation for spoken languages and hearing people as analyzed in de Swaan (2001). We argue that this very flexibility in communication and the resulting global communication patterns form the core of deaf culture and a key component of the characterization of deaf people as “visual people.” (Globalization, sign language, international sign, Deaf culture, language contact, multilingualism)*

Autism assessments for children who are deaf are particularly complex for a number of reasons, including overlapping cultural and clinical factors. We capture this in an ethnographic study of National Health Service child and adolescent mental health services in the United Kingdom, drawing on theoretical perspectives from transcultural psychiatry, which help to understand these services as a cultural system. Our objective was to analyse how mental health services interact with Deaf culture, as a source of cultural-linguistic identity. We ground the study in the practices and perceptions of 16 professionals, who have conducted autism assessments for deaf children aged 0-18. We adopt a framework of intersectionality to capture the multiple, mutually enforcing factors involved in this diagnostic process. We observed that professionals working in specialist Deaf services, or with experience working with the Deaf community, had intersectional understandings of assessments: the ways in which cultural, linguistic, sensory, and social factors work together to produce diagnoses. Working with a diagnostic system that focuses heavily on 'norms' based on populations from a hearing culture was a key source of frustration for professionals. We conclude that recognising the intersectionality of mental health and Deaf culture helps professionals provide sensitive diagnoses that acknowledge the multiplicity of D/deaf experiences.

The process of technological change in obstetrics must be understood as contingent on the exigencies of the professional project, rather than in terms simply of improvement or dehumanization of care. Transformation in the procedures by which the female pelvis and the fetal head have been measured illustrate this point. The development of new measurement techniques was profoundly influenced by the shifting locus of obstetric care and by changing professional concerns, including the initial demarcation of a professional practice and subsequent debates about preferred modes of intervention .Prior to the seventeenth century, processes of pregnancy and childbirth were almost exclusively the concern of women. The major role in the delivery was played by the mother herself, assisted by a midwife, almost certainly a woman. In the course of the seventeenth century, the practice of midwifery began to be regulated in many European countries, and educational requirements were imposed. Teaching, largely in anatomy and examination of candidate-midwives were made the responsibility of university-educated doctors. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the authority of (male) doctors in this traditionally female world grew. Doctors had the advantage of access to instruments with which they claimed they could bring difficult deliveries to successful conclusion. Midwives were often denied use of these instruments. Obstetrics was introduced into the university education of physicians, although normal deliveries remained the prime responsibility of midwives.Today pregnancy and delivery have largely become a matter for (mostly male) doctors, deploying a wide range of sophisticated technologies. Moreover, in modern obstetrics the fetus has become a patient in its own right -

This article explores relationships between deafness and citizenship claims, with a focus on deaf elderly and care. We concentrate on a care home for deaf elderly in the heart of the Netherlands, De Gelderhorst, as a site of deaf citizenship. Yet the claims to citizenship made through De Gelderhorst are far from singular. Rather, the center balances citizenship claims to the state as well as to the particular community that it constitutes. In this article, we explore the relationship between these multiple forms of citizenship that variably contradict and sustain one another. These multiple forms of citizenship, despite their contradictions, co-create a right to claim care and inclusion based on deafness. But which deafness? We explore how different deaf subjectivities by individuals and institutions alike are enacted. It is this multiplicity that allows for the claims to belonging, resources, or care that are embedded in deaf citizenship.

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