[Articulating Betweenity]

Minding My (Relative) Position

• Title Page
• Opening Articulation
• Minding
• Deaf Theory
• Technology & Passing
• Technology as a Tool
• Education
• Mediation/Pronunciation
• Wanting Words
• Captioning CODA
• CODA Closing
• Primary Sources
• Secondary Sources

 

Having then positioned myself in the multiple articulations of between (for all of these variations will indeed be reflected in the interviews and clips to follow), I also now offer my own positionality, as articulated in the “Why I Mind” video.^[2]  This five-minute video is the best argument I have, to date, about who I am and why I do what I do.  It frames well my approach to—and relationship with—the subject/s in “Articulating Betweenity.” 

Others too have written and theorized about such relational positioning—a concept particularly familiar to ethnographers, writers of creative non-fiction, historians, feminist theorists engaged in “standpoint” epistemologies, and even filmmakers.  In another piece in this exhibit collection, Cynthia Selfe unfolds well the concept of relational positioning in narratives as derived from the work of Bamberg as well as DePeuter, Buchholtz & Hall. It might be useful to think of between as a “critical incident” in the lives of many (most?) deaf and hard-of-hearing people.  Indeed some rich application of “critical incident theory” on the narratives in the DHH collection of the DALN has been impressively rendered by Clifton, Long, and Roen in another exhibit/piece for this collection, “Accessing Private Knowledge for Public Conversations Attending to Shared, Yet-to-be-Public Concerns in the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing DALN Interviews.”

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[2] The “Why I Mind” video was originally created as part of the “Information Stories: Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age” project produced through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that aimed to help make concrete some of the critical issues raised by Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age (Aspen Institute, 2009), which is the final report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.