Leading researchers in 30 nations describe the shared developmental, social, and educational issues facing deaf people filtered through the prism of unique national, regional, ethnic, and racial realities.

Bragg (English, Gallaudet U.) has collected a selection of sources including political writings and personal memoirs covering topics such as eugenics, speech and lip-reading, the right to work, and the controversy over separation or integration. This book offers a glimpse into an often overlooked but significant minority in American culture, and one which many of the articles asserts is more like an internal colony than simply a minority group. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Experience life as it is in the U.S. for those who cannot hear.

Selected papers from the conference held in Washington DC, July 9-14, 1989.

Although it is commonly believed that deafness and disability limits a person in a variety of ways, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India describes the two as a source of value in postcolonial India. Michele Friedner argues that the experiences of deaf people offer an important portrayal of contemporary self-making and sociality under new regimes of labor and economy in India. Friedner contends that deafness actually becomes a source of value for deaf Indians as they interact with nongovernmental organizations, with employers in the global information technology sector, and with the state. In contrast to previous political economic moments, deaf Indians increasingly depend less on the state for education and employment, and instead turn to novel and sometimes surprising spaces such as NGOs, multinational corporations, multilevel marketing businesses, and churches that attract deaf congregants. They also gravitate towards each other. Their social practices may be invisible to outsiders because neither the state nor their families have recognized Indian Sign Language as legitimate, but deaf Indians collectively learn sign language, which they use among themselves, and they also learn the importance of working within the structures of their communities to maximize their opportunities. Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India analyzes how diverse deaf people become oriented toward each other and disoriented from their families and other kinship networks. More broadly, this book explores how deafness, deaf sociality, and sign language relate to contemporary society.

Deaf people in New Zealand are often little known outside their own culture. People of the Eye brings their world to life in personal histories translated into English with a series of photographs of the deaf community. The storytellers are both old and young, and they reflect both the diversity and commonality of deaf experience; the painful lives of a generation brought up forbidden to use sign language contrasted with the confidence of young people using New Zealand Sign Language as they attend school and assert "deaf pride." The differences between children growing up in deaf families and those who struggle with identity as deaf children in hearing families are illuminating. These are stories of joy and sadness, confusion and resolution, and regret and optimism.

The People of the Eye compares the vales, customs and social organization of the Deaf World to those in ethnic groups. It portrays how the founding families of the Deaf World lived in early America and provides pedigrees for over two hundred lineages with Deaf members.