Reflections from the launch of The Deaf Legal Dilemma: Challenging Equality Law
My book, The Deaf Legal Dilemma: Challenging Equality Law, was published by Hart in June. Earlier this month, nearly three months later, we finally got to celebrate its publication.
The launch brought together people in Bristol and online, and gave me an opportunity to talk in BSL about some of the ideas that have occupied me for a very long time.
At the heart of the book is a fairly simple problem.
Deaf people experience barriers and inequalities throughout their lives. Equality law provides important rights and protections, but it overwhelmingly understands deaf people through a disability model.
And therein lies the dilemma.
I am a deaf man. I want to be able to work, visit my GP, go to hospital and access services on an equal basis with everyone else. But when I need to rely on equality law to secure those rights, I have to declare that I am disabled.
Disability is part of the picture, and disability rights matter enormously, but deaf people are more complicated than that. Language, culture, community, identity and our different lived experiences matter too. Yet the law recognises some of those dimensions much less readily than others.
If I don’t rely on disability rights, however, I may have no enforceable rights at all.
That is the Deaf Legal Dilemma.
The short video above brings together a few moments from the launch and introduces some of that argument in BSL, with English captions.
Thank you again to everyone who came to the launch, whether in Bristol or online, and to everyone who has supported the book since its publication.
And this seems as good a place as any to begin this Substack.
I plan to use this space occasionally to write about Deaf Legal Studies, equality and discrimination law, sign language law, research, and some of the other things I’m working on, probably with the odd diversion along the way.
The Deaf Legal Dilemma: Challenging Equality Law is out now from Hart Publishing.
20% discount code: GLR BD8
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