Third-year UoP student Megan Conway has put together a fascinating exhibition currently on display in the Library about the history of Deafness and Deaf education, along with this post for the UoP library blog explaining how we have evolved from earlier societies in which those who could not hear were frequently excluded from education, religion, legal rights, and public life, through the beginnings of education for the deaf in the seventeenth century to today when deaf culture is recognised as a vibrant linguistic and cultural community shaped by shared language, visual identity, activism, performance, art, literature, and political resistance.
Illustration from John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the naturall language of the hand (1644).
Sign language interpreter at FridaysForFuture protest in Berlin in 2025 by Leonhard Lenz, Wikimedia Commons
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