Individuals With Both Hearing and Vision Loss Share Their Challenges About Everyday Living

“There is a prevalent misconception in modern society that if a person who is disabled accomplishes some goal, such as attaining a college degree or winning a sporting competition, the disability essentially vanishes, and life becomes ‘normal’ for the still-disabled person.” Editor Scott M. Stoffel makes this observation in his new book Deaf-Blind Reality: Living the Life. “This is probably the result of films and literature that conclude with the disabled main character achieving a goal at the end of the story, leaving the audience to assume the challenges have been ‘conquered’ once and for all. Unfortunately, the reality of life for people who are deaf-blind is not so simple.”

“Most people truly don’t understand what life is like for people who are deaf-blind, nor can they relate to what deaf-blind people go through,” notes Stoffel, who, himself, is deaf-blind. “That is the very reason I decided to create this book. I wanted to illustrate the real world of people who are deaf-blind through the actual life experiences of many deaf-blind individuals. That said, no attempt was made to tell extraordinary accounts of monumental achievement. The book instead deals with all of those unspectacular—but altogether daunting—challenges that never make it into the amazing stories, despite being of greater importance, because they pertain to everyday life.”

See directly into the minds of deaf-blind individuals and learn what they think and feel in various real-life situations. Read chapter nine, “Daily Life,”, and order your copy of Deaf-Blind Reality.

Review: Deaf Epistemologies

In Deaf Epistemologies: Multiple Perspectives on the Acquisition of Knowledge, editors Peter V. Paul and Donald F. Moores, along with 12 noted scholars and researchers, examine the many ways that deaf people see and acquire deaf knowledge. Reference & Research Books News took notice of this groundbreaking volume stating, “Scholars of deaf studies, education, sign language, and other fields explore the acquisition of knowledge by deaf people from the perspectives of sociology and anthropology, history/psychology and literature, and education and philosophy. Among the topics are juggling two worlds, implications of diversity and deaf identity for personal epistemologies in deaf education, encounters with deaf heroes and heroines, collaborative knowledge building for accessibility in academia, and whether it can be a good thing to be deaf.” Read more about this new collection in chapter thirteen, “Can It Be a Good Thing to Be Deaf?”, and order Deaf Epistemologies now.

Review: Discourse in Signed Languages

In Discourse in Signed Languages, a stellar, international cast of cognitive linguists, sociolinguists, and discourse analysts discover and demonstrate how sign language users make sense of what is going on within their social and cultural contexts in face-to-face interactions Choice magazine recommends this volume for graduate students, researchers, faculty, and professionals while noting that the contributors “use various methodologies and approaches in order to arrive at a working definition of discourse analysis, a term that scholars use to describe language interactions in different settings and situations that suggest different meanings.” Also, the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education states: “For those who enjoy learning more about ASL [American Sign Language] structures and their forms and functions used by people in actual situations, this book will be enlightening and thought provoking. It will bring readers up to speed on the latest findings in the field of ASL discourse.” Read chapter three and place your order here.