The Predicament of d/Deaf: Towards an Anthropology of Not-Disability

In our research with d/Deaf people in five families in the North and South Islands of New Zealand, we found that some of the challenges that we as researchers faced in our encounters with participants and within our mixed hearing and d/Deaf research group paralleled broader issues for this community. We use the details of our field research processes to explore the conundrum of d/Deafness, which may or may not be a disability, and use this exploration to reflect on approaches to d/Deafness as revealed in our research findings. We argue that d/Deafness creates a predicament, but not only for the d/Deaf. We propose that practical solutions to this predicament may be thought of as services that enable citizenship, participation, communication, and care, rather than disability services, and this rethinking would ease the cognitive and cultural dissonance experienced by perfectly able d/Deaf people who have to access disability services in their everyday life.