Critical CartographyMapping Deaf Research Michael E. Skyer (bio) Approaches to Social Research: The Case of Deaf Studies. Alys Young and Bogusia Temple. Oxford University Press, 2014. 208 pp. $69.00 (hardcover). A map is only as good as the cartographer; likewise, the utility it offers to those who desire its guidance. This statement encapsulates Approaches to Social Research: The Case of Deaf Studies, Alys Young and Bogusia Temple Young's timely, perhaps obligatory, addition to the methodological literature on deaf research. When I read this book, I envisioned a primeval landscape evolving with the pressures of geology, time, and human influence into an increasingly recognizable vista. In their slim but impactful volume, Young and Temple take pains to describe deaf social research as motile and, at times, frustratingly elusive. The authors use adjectives like fluid, in-flux, hybrid, and contested to describe the field's advance from its inception to the present. In this way, Young and Temple work like cartographers to capture newly fractured terrains, well-worn pathways, and domains ripe for future upheaval. They craft sensitive arguments, pose incisive questions, and synthesize decades of research in a way that will be found useful by seasoned and novice researchers alike. Indeed, one of the authors' most miraculous feats of map-making is their treatment of the book's subject for two divergent audiences: those with and those without familiarity with deaf research's amorphous landscape. Colocating social research and deaf studies provides what is perhaps the book's most intriguing argument: its overt stance on the potential benefits of cross-pollinating them. In so doing, the text provides a useful compass with which deaf methodologists and general social researchers can attain their bearings. In their introduction, the authors warn that their text may be troubling. The assumption is that its unnerving traits might aggrieve readers in both aforementioned categories. For experienced deaf researchers, disappointment would perhaps stem from Young and Temple's occasionally ambiguous answers to the deft questions they pose. For instance, their characteristic problematizing stance on ethics concerning deaf identities is dropped in the final chapter, one that gushes with optimism for new communication technologies (thus neglecting potential problems for privacy and confidentiality in research). Perhaps the deaf research neophyte would be troubled by the paradoxical treatment of certain arguments and pressing controversies. For instance, the bioethics of cochlear implant technologies are scarcely mentioned. Elsewhere, readers may have concerns about the curious laissez-faire approach to the consequences of various orientations to epistemology. While Young [End Page 158] and Temple clearly state that "positions taken on epistemology, methods, and methodologies have political and ethical consequences" (p. 4), they seldom detail concrete effects those outcomes may engender or how to mitigate them. The text is roughly divided into two parts. The first (chapters 1–4) provides a detailed and contemporary topography of deaf studies research. Part 1 also generates numerous questions—however few answers—about the conduct of research involving deaf people. This section concerns the researcher's integration of epistemology, positionality, and identity relative to deaf epistemologies and ontologies. Via the deaf analytic lens, methodological debates familiar to researchers out of our field are clearly and freshly argued. The second half (chapters 5–9) poses arguments about how to conduct research and offers recommendations for judging or consuming it. The authors advocate dismantling the "silo thinking" (p. 5) that arbitrarily separate deaf and nondeaf research. In their arguments, deaf people are thoroughgoing members of broader social movements under study. As a result, deaf social researchers simply cannot afford to "ignore" developments in mainstream methodological theory. Simultaneously, researchers studying wider social movements, such as scholars in the fields of indigenous studies, multilingualism studies, and multimodal analysis, cannot afford to disregard the perspectives of deaf, Deaf, and affiliated social groups, such as Codas (children of deaf adults). Throughout both sections, the text succeeds in its overarching aim: to open more substantial dialogues between specialists within and outside the field. To use geological metaphors, Young and Temple aim to build a methodological Pangea. This argument is perhaps their most impactful contribution. It is particularly appealing to early-career researchers, such as myself, aiming to substantially reform or hybridize the...
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Apr 11, 2022
Anabel Maler 
Open Access
