Hearing as a Social Issue

In the Introduction we presented the idea that the social landscape, in which people with hearing disability live, requires attention. This chapter delves into the depths of this issue in two ways, first by arguing that disability in general and deafness in particular, has been the focus of a negative form of governance for over 150 years and second by examining the extent to which (if at all) this form of governance has served to the detriment of people with hearing disability. To this end we recount, through the lens of historical sociology, the social construction of notions of disability, deafness and impairment. This work builds upon Hogan (1997) while also noting that quite recently more and more researchers (e.g. de Feu and Chovaz 2014) are recognising the antecedents of the values of disability that still problematise life for people today. In turn we provide a social profile of people with hearing disability to illustrate who these people are that we keep referring to and why their social position might be an issue. We draw primarily on Australian data and provide an overview of research literature on a range of issues including wellbeing. The aim of this chapter is to document as much as we know about the social position of this cohort in the one place.