Knowing by DEAF-listening: Epistemologies and ontologies revealed in song-signing

Abstract

English speech and hearing are perceived by many in the UK population as the key ways that people listen, learn, and know. This often-invisible assumption quietly colors almost every element of social interaction—within schooling, health, governance, social care, or in art and entertainment. This article unpacks the ways that a particular kind of sensorial bias can become embedded in knowledge-making practices to the exclusion of other possibilities. Through ethnographic appraisal of signed versions of songs—“song-signing”—one can witness how language and listening rigidities are built into the architecture of British social behaviors and public systems. I argue that attending to rigid perceptions concerning ways of listening as regards expectations of song experiences, and more broadly, presents a means for exposing invisible epistemic bias and injustice against deaf people. Throughout this text, readers are asked to alter expectations concerning sensory perception and definitions of listening. What this article ultimately explains is why what may seem to nonsigners to be an anodyne creative act of “song interpretation” in fact feeds into a political landscape that is divisive along sensorial and therefore epistemic and ontological lines.