Last January, I joined the Deaf Academics mailing list (a “listserv”), which is co-owned by Dr. Teresa Burke and Dr. Christian Vogler. As I mentioned earlier, Dr. Vogler is one of three deaf computer science Ph.Ds today, and he invited me to join the list after we met (via Skype) in January.

It’s been about six months, so I’ve had the chance to read some of the many adventures, discussions, and opinions of other deaf and hard of hearing professionals. It’s a highly active listserv. I would estimate that there’s been about 800 emails sent since the time I joined, so I’ve only had the time to read a fraction of them. Most of the emails are sent by a handful of people who are really dedicated to the list and often write several messages daily. With many emails seemingly written as if they were carefully composed 400-word blog entries, the average quality of emails is significantly higher than those in other mailing lists, such as the Access STEM one shown in the screenshot.

As a result, some of the discussions have been quite interesting and eye-opening to me. Given that many of the active listserv users are social scientists and/or writers, the themes prevalent in the mailing list primarily revolve around deaf culture, deaf education, deaf history, and stories about people’s experiences, lives, and current occupations.

Here’s a sample of the discussion in this listserv. As you can see, the scope of these topics can be quite deep and theoretical.

  1. Deaf/blind-deaf/blind marriages and deaf/blind marrying other, non-deaf and non-blind people. A deaf and blind man asked why deaf/blind-deaf/blind marriage rates were so low despite today’s technology that increasingly allows for long-distance contact. He talked about his own community of deaf people and noticed that many married “outsiders” (i.e. hearing people). He made a parallel to marriages among Asians and Caucasian, and furthered the discussion by considering partnerships among the LGBT community.

  2. The use of webpages to make one’s academic presence known. Since a lot of information is exchanged through conversation, whether it be at a conference or during an informal lunch, deaf people can lose out on those benefits, which perhaps means we need stronger web presences with links to all of our work to better allow other scientists to work with us.

  3. A debate over whether the old “Deaf and Dumb” phrase should be eradicated or recycled into something positive. In the past, the “dumb” part meant that a deaf person was mute, but a person on the listserv claimed that when oral deaf people — those who speak and generally do not sign — became more prominent, they viewed the “dumb” part as meaning stupid. (The ensuing conversation in the listserv became a bit rough, so one of the co-owners had to intervene to warn against further asperity.)

  4. The history of deaf studies and deaf education. An older deaf woman commented that most of the scholars studying and describing deaf education were hearing and Caucasian. She felt that there was too much of a disconnection between the scholars and the people in the deaf community and argued that, as a result, deaf studies is filled with unproven and possibly facetious theorems. Her initial message also spawned a discussion about the failings of current deaf education.

  5. Last, but not least … captioning in airline movies! A middle-aged dead woman said she had been on a United Airlines flight and couldn’t understand the movies because there was no closed captioning. Does this sound like a familiar story? Others responded immediately to the original email, with some saying that it was a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the succeeding people correcting them by pointing out that airlines are under the Air Carrier Access Act. This discussion prompted me to post my (as of today) only message to the listserv, linking my blog entry and sharing my experience with airline movies. I was then pleasantly surprised to see that a deaf man who I met a few years ago was actually a subscriber to the list and had seen my message, so he became yet another person who has seen my growing blog.

I have to say that I was surprised that a mailing list like this existed and was active. It’s actually been around since 2002, so I wonder why I didn’t know about it earlier. But now that I have joined and blogged about it, hopefully this leads to another aspiring deaf academic to join the list. In the meantime, I’ve already started thinking about possible blog entries that expand some of the themes I explored in the mailing list.