If you have ever been to Florence, you would be in awe of its splendour. It is the city of Dante (The Divine Comedy), Michelangelo (Statue of David) and Leonardo da Vinci (The Mona Lisa). With Ponte Vecchio and the little shops selling gold at one end and the majestic Basillica di Santa Croce on the other.
But if you ask my partner, Marco, you will realise that the perceptions of Florence, from the cultural tourist to the inhabitants of the town, couldn’t be more different. The 360° art and history left no space for anything else. Young Florentines had very few leisure activities, it was a rather restrictive place to live in.
This is the dichotomy I want to express here. How a city, in its cultural galore and reknown heritage, is actually rather oppressive. I know Marco would interject to say, “but its my City, I’m proud of where I was brought up.” But the young Marco would tell a different story. It is amazing how one place can create two very different experiences. In particular, the perspectives of those who live in the city and those who perceive the city from the outside.
In the Deaf community, we have a similar problem. There is a dichotomy between the views of the insider and that of the outsider.
I have to start with the obvious dichotomy to consider. The perspectives on ‘deafness’ itself creates a dichotomy. My colleagues in the department of Life Sciences would defend the view that deaf people naturally want to be cured, because it is an obvious consequence of putting right something that is wrong (define wrong, I would say!). But, in reality, many deaf people are not that bothered. This outsider perception belongs to hearing people and it is projected onto deaf people. But the insider view is more concerned with life opportunities to be educated, work, have a family and buy a home (ie. equality of opportunity). The chasm between the two perspectives are held apart by language – one would never understand the other unless they are bilingual and bicultural.
I am faced with this dichotomy with other researchers interested in community engagement. Most of my colleagues were not members of the communities they are researching on, they hold an outsider perspective. The first questions they ask is “who am I and what potential harm can I do just by being here.” Essentially, this ethical discussion takes the position of the observer.
But as an insider to the Deaf community, I can’t be an observer. I cannot shift from socialising in the community at the weekend and then withdraw for the purpose of observation during the week; my friends would look at me with raised eyebrows. Instead, I am a mediator between the passions of the community and the aims of the research. I empower the community to become the researchers themselves and devolve the authorship to them (ie. shared ownership). Their journey through the activities become the outcomes of the research.
As you can imagine, it is hard for outsider and insider researchers to come together and share points of views. I think they are too far removed and it effects the validity of the data, and they think I am too close to the subject matter and potentially influence the data. This dichotomous relationship brings two research paradigms alive. There should be space, with different methodology, for insider and outsider research.
I have been supporting a PhD student who has identified a similar insider/outsider issue. He discovered that mainstream education, known as inclusive education, was in fact exclusive in practice. Deaf children are more likely to experience exclusion from their education and isolation from social activities. Alternatively, children in specialist education found themselves in a more inclusive environment to prepare the student for life outside of the school, but this type of school is considered exclusive. The insider/outsider relationships create a discontinuous problem from theory/philosophy to its implementation.
Recently, I was in a conversation with a CEO of an organisation who remarked that the politicalisation of Deaf people is a source of problems in the field of deafness. The reality is that different organisations/Government agencies have been playing with insider/outsider politics for quite a while, and there is a lot of evidence of the fall out. The Deaf community only had two responses available to them: become a subaltern (people devoid of a political voice, without the possibility to have that voice) or create a political response to reassert the balance between the insiders and outsiders. The former has been our historical legacy and epitomised in the 1945-1970 period in education when pure oralism was widely practiced. The latter resurfaced after 100 years of oppression and resulted with the assertion of political voice in the 1970s (eg. NUD).
This discussion leaves me in awe of the Michelangelo’s work. The statue of David stands tall (17 foot high) above the people, craning their necks and shielding from the sunlight in Piazza della Signoria. It is a juxtaposition between the real and the imagined. David was suppose to be boy-sized but Michaelangelo wanted to bring the spirit of David alive, at the towering height of Goliath. The sculptor was bringing the inside out for all to see.
