The Education Of The Deaf And Dumb An Exposition And A Review Of The French And German Systems

Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture. Drawing on a range of works, from fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, to poetry by deaf poets and life writing by deaf memoirists Harriet Martineau and John Kitto, to scientific treatises by Alexander Graham Bell and Francis Galton, Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people’s language use was a public, influential, and contentious issue in Victorian Britain. The Victorians understood signed languages in multiple, and often contradictory, ways: they were objects of fascination and revulsion, were of scientific import and literary interest, and were considered both a unique mode of human communication and a vestige of a bestial heritage. Over the course of the nineteenth century, deaf people were increasingly stripped of their linguistic and cultural rights by a widespread pedagogical and cultural movement known as “oralism,” comprising mainly hearing educators, physicians, and parents. Engaging with a group of human beings who used signs instead of speech challenged the Victorian understanding of humans as “the speaking animal” and the widespread understanding of “language” as a product of the voice. It is here that Reading Victorian Deafness offers substantial contributions to the fields of Victorian studies and disability studies. This book expands current scholarly conversations around orality, textuality, and sound while demonstrating how understandings of disability contributed to Victorian constructions of normalcy. Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people were used as material test subjects for the Victorian process of understanding human language and, by extension, the definition of the human.

This is a collection of essays that address the international changes in welfare policy. The book discusses the new patterns of governing associated with the notions of welfare, care, and education that emerge during the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first-centuries. The issues examined are, among others, the role of international donors and their emphasis on efficiency and lower social subsidies, international migration and its impact on welfare policy inclusions (and exclusions), and national policy change. While representing many different locations and traditions, contributors work within a variety of critical theoretical perspectives that critique our cultural ways of reasoning about the care and education of the child, the role and practice of the state, and the social and cultural construction of citizenship and nationhood.