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To cite this work: Bramley, R. (2025). Dancing on Thin Ice: Adventures in Reconciling the Deaf Studies/Disability Studies Divide. Disability Dialogues. 91ֱ��: iHuman, University of 91ֱ��. 

Ryan Bramley is a lecturer, filmmaker, and arts-based researcher currently based at the University of 91ֱ��’s School of Education. His research primarily explores how minoritised groups are represented in film, TV, media, education, and beyond. This Disability Dialogues piece arises from the disciplinary tensions Ryan and colleagues have faced whilst trying to bring together Deaf Studies and Disability Studies literature and scholarship in a recent iHuman-affiliated research project, ‘’.

In 2011, Annelies Kusters - a Deaf scholar who was then completing her PhD in Deaf Studies at the University of Bristol - wrote a review of Burch and Kafer’s edited book, Deaf and Disability Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2010), for the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. The title of Kusters’ review, ‘Deaf and Disability Studies: Do They Tango?’, highlighted a simple yet significant observation: despite overlaps between the two disciplines, Deaf Studies and Disability Studies do not always get along. It is a divide that I have become increasingly familiar with since embarking on my first research project with Deaf people three years ago.

In late 2021, Dr Kirsty Liddiard and I were approached by Dr Rachael Black, our Faculty of Social Sciences’ Knowledge Exchange Associate, with details of a possible collaboration with , a 91ֱ��-based user research and service design company. Paper wanted to do a research project exploring how Deaf people perceive suspense in films. We were put in touch with Jon Rhodes, Paper’s Delivery Director, and Beth Evans, a former University of 91ֱ�� Screen Translation MA student who had come up with the idea of this research project. Kirsty and I, as experts in Disability Studies and Film respectively, jumped at the opportunity. In May 2022, we published our first joint blog post for iHuman, sharing how we - as hearing people interested in Deaf audiences’ experiences of film - had attempted to embed Deaf-centric approaches from the project’s outset:

From our early collaboration as a team our aim has been to co-create a meaningfully accessible research process. Our research is participatory through its inclusion and engagement with an Advisory Group made up of Deaf people. [...] To effectively embed Deaf-centric approaches within the project, our Advisory Group is actively guiding the project, its themes and approaches, and providing expert knowledge and guidance across the process to ensure an inclusive process for Deaf participants and their communities. Our Advisory Group also ensures that Deaf people’s voices and lived knowledges sit at the core of the project, acknowledging that Kirsty, Ryan, Beth and Jon are hearing people and thus have no embodied experiences of Deafness and/or audism. (Bramley, Evans, Liddiard and Rhodes, 2022, paras. 3-4)

The research, which became known as ‘Rethinking Deafness, film and accessibility’, was generally considered to be a success. Despite being a short-term, small-scale project with limited resources (generously granted by the 91ֱ�� Innovation Programme as well as Paper Ltd. themselves), our interviews with Deaf participants revealed a host of barriers to an immersive cinematic experience, including poor captioning, few cinema screenings subtitled for Deaf and hard of hearing audiences, and limited personalisation options for captions at home (). Our findings were disseminated in the form of two short films, ‘’ and ‘’ (both 2024), and our e for a more accessible and inclusive cinematic experience for Deaf audiences were also submitted as evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s British Film and High-End Television Inquiry to benefit their exploration of ‘What needs to change to ensure the industry is supporting inclusivity and sustainability’ (). However, when it came to presenting our research at conferences - and Disability Studies conferences in particular - we encountered several challenges of our own.

It is important to acknowledge at this point that many Deaf people do not identify as disabled (Lane, 2005) - something that Critical Disability Studies scholars often overlook (see O’Connell, 2024 for a very recent example). That said, in 2023, the Nordic Network on Disability Research (NNDR) - one of the largest international Disability Studies conferences in the world - dedicated its 16th Research Conference to “strengthening dialogue and relations with Deaf studies and adjacent fields concerns with the lives of d/Deaf people around the world” (NNDR, 2023). We submitted a paper to NNDR, and in May 2023, Kirsty and I headed to Reykjavík to present our work. The talk went well, but we were struck by the enduring divide between Deaf Studies and Disability Studies across the conference itself. We have reflected on this experience in a draft journal article that we hope to publish later this year:

'Unfortunately, as hearing researchers who presented a work-in-progress paper at NNDR 2023, we were disappointed to see that only the keynotes and the d/Deaf Studies strand talks were accompanied by live English-to-ISL (International Sign Language) translation; d/Deaf researchers could access d/Deaf Studies content, but the dozens of Disability Studies talks were inaccessible to them. What Kusters wrote over a decade earlier - “Disability Studies has largely excluded deaf people’s experiences, not recognizing the centrality of language issues" (2011, p. 555) - sadly still rings true'. (Bramley, Evans and Liddiard, forthcoming)

Kusters believes that it is “necessary that a constructive and fruitful relationship between the disciplines [of Deaf Studies and Disability Studies] is based on a dialectal process that starts from an in-depth study of what fundamentally constitutes the two disciplines” (Kusters, 2011, p. 555). Whilst NNDR’s attempts to facilitate such a dialogue between Disability Studies and Deaf Studies were admirable and well-intentioned, they were essentially hampered by the same disciplinary shortcoming of the Deaf and Disability Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives book (Burch and Kafer, 2010) that Kusters reviewed over 10 years ago:  'Disability Studies has largely excluded deaf people’s experiences, not recognizing the centrality of language issues'. (Kusters, 2011, p. 555)

‘Rethinking Deafness, film and accessibility’ demonstrates one small but significant way in which the coming together of Deaf Studies and Disability Studies - and in particular, our understanding of Crip and Deaf Gain, reframings which transgress deficit models of disability and deafness respectively - can usefully inform explorations of the experiences of Deaf people as an underrepresented group in research. However, whilst trying to tango between the two disciplines, we recognise that we are dancing on thin ice. Against a backdrop of interdisciplinary debate and disagreement, we must be careful not to make the same mistakes that Kusters highlights, or else risk our plans falling through. 

References 

Burch, S. and Kafer, A. (2010). Deaf and disability studies : interdisciplinary perspectives. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press.

Kusters, A. (2011). Deaf and Disability Studies: Do They Tango? Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 16(4), p.555. doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/deafed/enr005.

Lane, H. (2005). Ethnicity, Ethics, and the Deaf-World. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 10(3), pp.291–310. doi:.

O’Connell, N. (2024). Deaf People’s Retrospective Views and Lived Experiences of Ableism and Discrimination in Education: A Qualitative Study Informed by Critical Disability Studies. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 26(1), pp.492–504. doi:https://doi.org/10.16993/sjdr.1058.