Exploring

By Sarah Brant and Jackie Alarcon

Welcome to our website.  We seek to offer a glimpse into Deaf culture and provide some foundations for understanding deaf communities.

What is culture?  Culture is clearly many different things.  We particularly appreciated the definition of culture as " the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while also distinguishing those of another group."  Click here for more information. 

Within this definition, Deaf Culture can be seen as a group of people who learn a basic set of shared! values, norms of behaviors, survival techniques, and a system of communicating.  A foundation of shared experiences and learned behaviors allow them to come together to form a community.   

In this case, one could argue that the Deaf community shares a common language - in the U.S. this might be American Sign Language (ASL), although others would argue that people can be part of Deaf culture and not know ASL, or could know ASL and yet not be a part of Deaf culture.  Because the manifestations of Deaf culture are fluid, not static, as are all cultures, what we can say is that Deaf culture is a complex and rich culture with great variation within the group.  Learn more about Deaf Culture here!

The answers to some common questions about deafness can be found by  clicking  here!