Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies

Sound studies and Deaf studies may seem at first impression to operate in worlds apart. We argue in this article, however, that similar renderings of hearing, deafness, and seeing as ideal types - and as often essentialized sensory modes - make it possible to read differences between Sound studies and Deaf studies as sites of possible articulation. We direct attention to four zones of productive overlap, attending to how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice, how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deafhearing dichotomies, how “deaf futurists“ champion cyborg sound, and how signing and other non-spoken communicative practices might undo phonocentric models of speech. Sound studies and Deaf studies emerge as fields with much to offer one another epistemologically, theoretically, and practically

Disability studies and development geography: Empirical connections, theoretical resonances, and future directions

Scholarship that jointly considers disability and development has advanced over the past decade to include greater attention to the shared histories of colonialism, racism, and the disability category and the relationships among developmental states, ideas about disability, and development projects. A handful of geographers have also directly addressed disability and development or disability in the “developing world” context. This paper reviews current scholarship and highlights three areas where disability studies and development geography share under-explored empirical connections and theoretical resonances: the disability–poverty nexus, interventions in the name of improvement and cure, and mobility and migration. Yet bringing greater attention to disability in development must be done carefully, given the fraught nature of the disability category. As such, this paper also considers how development geographers might contribute to the literature while accounting for the ways in which ideas about what constitutes “disability” and what constitutes “development” emerge through sets of processes and relationships