Becoming Deaf in the Posthuman Era: Posthumanism, Arts-Based Research and Deaf Education

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore posthumanism as a possible paradigm shift for deaf education which is presently mired in binarized thinking concerning language choices. The ontologies, epistemologies, research methodologies and pedagogy associated with posthumanism propose a radical shift in thinking about what it means to educate deaf adolescents who struggle to acquire English as an additional language whom I teach in a small resource room program contained within a high school in a midwestern Canadian city. Posthumanist onto-epistemology proposes a shift from anthropocentrism to a posthumanism that emphasizes multiple and shifting relationships between animals, plants, humans, and the earth. Here, posthumanism proposes that human activity not be defined according to a binarized lens often used by many governing bodies, policy developers, medical specialists, and educators but include the material realities as expressed by animal, plant and mineral entities. Implications of the shift from anthropocentricism to posthumanism is explored within the context of deaf education where language choices (American Sign Language and spoken English) are presented as binary opposites to deaf children and youth, parents and educators. This text is rhizomatic in that it affords several points of entry at multiple levels, that is, the personal, the classroom where I teach deaf adolescents, the social and political arena, and the academy. This dissertation includes 1) a narrative inquiry into my becoming a posthumanist researcher where I grapple with my understanding of posthumanist onto-epistemology (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2005; Coole & Frost, 2010; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Haraway, 1991) and becoming a posthumanist teacherresearcher within the context of the classroom of deaf adolescents whom I teach, 2) application of posthumanist methodology in investigating the arts-based literacy interventions with deaf adolescents (Barrett & Bolt, 2013; Braidotti, 2013; Coole & Frost, 2010; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; jagodzinski & Wallin, 2013; Koro-Ljungberg, 2016) and 3) the application of affective pedagogy shaped by posthumanist ontoepistemology (Hickey-Moody, 2009; 2013) to arts-based interventions with deaf adolescents. Findings from this rhizomatic exploration of posthumanism underscores recent anthropological discoveries of deaf anthropologists concerning deaf people and their learning, the relevance of translanguaging as an approach to language acquisition for deaf children and youth, and a paradigm shift toward the posthumanist deaf subject which affords a line of flight out of and away from the binarized choices concerning language acquisition in deaf children and youth.