F.03. Deaf Inclusion as a Democratic Imperative

When talking about people with disabilities, popular imagination tends to represent only some kinds of disabilities: after all, you can easily recognise a person with mobility disability or someone who is blind. Incredibly, d/Deaf people are often invisibilised.

While the discourse about inclusion and accessibility is extending to more and more disabilities, d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people worldwide continue to face social, cultural, and structural barriers that limit access to fundamental rights, such as education, information, public services and participation.

These obstacles include inadequate accessibility provisions, incomplete specific training for special needs teachers, the marginalization of Sign Languages and Deaf Culture. Furthermore, some fossilized stereotypes about deafness seem to persist across different national, institutional, and historical settings.

Opening on international perspectives from Deaf Studies, Linguistics, Inclusive Pedagogy, History of Education, this panel aims to explore deafness through linguistic, cognitive, cultural, historical, social and educational dimensions.

It welcomes interventions reflecting on how dominant ideas about language, ability, communication, and what counts as “normal” shape social and school practices and may limit d/Deaf people’s and students’ agency.

Both theoretical and empirical contributions on successful examples of accessible and inclusive educational environments (e.g. bilingual models, multimodal and visual teaching approaches, Universal Design for Learning) or projects about advocacy/ self-advocacy are also gladly accepted.

The panel also encourages reflections on how d/Deaf identities, stories, linguistic and cultural practices could meaningfully inspire or be integrated into both social policies and educational governance.