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Damned for Their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf People as Disabled

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Collaboratively researched and written by Jan Branson (Director of the National Institute for Deaf Studies and Sign Language Research, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) and Don Miller (Head of Anthropology, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), Damned For Their Difference: The Cultural Construction Of Deaf People As Disabled is a sharply written criticism of various societies' tendency to classify deaf people as "disabled", a term that excludes them from the mainstream of the culture -- often with harmful side effects. In examining the question of what "disabled" really means, Branson and Miller blend history, biography, and social structures with a justifiably critical perspective at the over-emphasis on oral aspects of Western culture in the past and present. Damned For Their Difference is a very strongly recommended, inherently fascinating and arguably persuasively written account of an endemic social issue with respecting to the hearing impaired.