“life… is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.”
J. G. Ballard
This page is about my academic writing and research. I’ve also written about different aspects of the culture and environment of the academic sector, and about training, coaching and mentoring.
Background
Between 2002 and 2017 I was a hearing person working in Deaf Studies. My work was historical, cultural and political, and was mostly about the extraordinary, but equally valid ‘alternative, visual reality’ that deaf people live in, and how it challenges our belief that our ‘hearing world’ is the only one worth thinking about. I wrote about this, and about being a non-deaf academic in the field. Much of my experience from that time was blogged about through a personal site at mikegulliver.com.
During that period, through my Masters and PhD, and through a series of international conferences and publications, my primary contribution was to establish and grow the new academic area of ‘Deaf Geographies’. You can read about that at the Deaf Geographies site.
In about 2015, deaf people gradually began to assume leadership of a field that – for a long time – had been dominated by hearing people. At around the same time, personal circumstances meant I could no longer rely on temporary research contracts. Since I didn’t want to leave academia entirely behind, I shifted into development, supporting those who were still engaged in research and the organisations that they work for.
I now see my academic writing fulfilling more of a ‘support’ role. Deaf Studies is young. Deaf history and deaf geographies are younger still. My aim is to do much of the grunt work of back-filling where there are gaps, so that those working in the field can continue to build, and I can continue to contribute – without getting in their way!
Current project
Currently: Bringing work on the spaces of the C19th London deaf community to print, along with a more general exploration of the critical potential of the concept of ‘deaf space’.
2021: Deaf people in the census. Investigation, story-telling, family trees, data-capture on deaf returns in C19th Bristol census.
2021 – 2022: Supporting conversations between Roboticists and deaf community. Facilitation and methodological discussion.
2014 – 2017: Researching the UK’s first official ‘signing church’, St Saviour’s, Oxford Street in London. 19th and 20th century history. Archival work, writing, publishing, conference and TV presentations.
2009 – 2015: Development of Deaf Geographies as an academic field.
2002 – 2009: Historical explorations into ‘Deaf nationhood’, and ‘Deaf space’. Dissertations and PhD completed on aspects of sign language recognition and ‘ownership’, the history of deaf realities, and the construction of deaf history.
The Garage of Books 