Education that lacks access to deaf experience: odd situations in Sweden

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses disadvantaging situations that deaf students encounter in higher education in Sweden. We report two recent cases of deaf students’ academic welfare being put at risk. We foreground in these cases the ‘odd situations’ that arise when provisions that fail to access the particular nature of deaf experience also fail to secure deaf students’ participation rights, to be and become the deaf person they wish to be, lead the life they wish to live, and so on. Often, the ‘oddness’ of the situations that arise is in part indicated by no-one involved lacking in good intentions or not doing their very best: there is no lack of good will, but a lack of shared understanding. What deaf students know differently is rarely present in deliberation and not part of forward planning. We infer that situations of this sort reflect epistemic injustice. We propose that this form of formative epistemic injustice – educators not taking on board what deaf students know – can perhaps be overcome by higher education institutions proactively involving deaf students in matters that concern both them and future deaf students.

Keywords:

• Higher education access
• deaf students
• epistemic injustice
• social epistemology

Introduction

Thus, in terms of epistemic justice, the only power worth acquiring from knowledge is the power not to be dominated by others. (Fuller, 2002, p. xix)

The university is not an engine of social transformation. Activism is. (Kelly, 2016)

The university is an overwhelmingly hearing institution (Komesaroff, 2005; Snoddon, 2022) in which deaf students and deaf staff¹ are underrepresented (Richardson, 2001; Shaw, 2021; Thoutenhoofd & Adams Lyngbäck, 2023; Weedon, 2017; Woodcock et al., 2007). Although there is little statistical evidence concerning the transition rates of deaf school leavers to university it is clear that the underrepresentation of deaf students in higher education is, to a considerable extent, attributable to barriers deaf pupils encounter throughout compulsory education (Hendar, 2009; Hendar & O’Neill, 2016; Holden Pitt & Diaz, 1998; Powers et al., 1999; Thoutenhoofd, 2005; Thoutenhoofd et al., 2005). Contrary to what might be supposed, the so-called ‘soundscape’ (Grinfeder et al., 2022) of universities – roughly, all that is involved in students’ experience of listening and hearing in higher education settings – in fact reduces differences between hearing and deaf students. When all students (that is, not only deaf students) are asked, a substantively greater number than only deaf students report issues to do with hearing, listening and noise distracting them from study (Thoutenhoofd et al., 2016). This observation is a good reminder of the truism that improving access for a specific group of students often benefits all students. There are, however, other factors that help account for underrepresentation.

What distinguishes deaf students’ experiences of higher education are firstly obvious matters to do with support arrangements that give access to essentially hearing teaching and learning environments (Hendry et al., 2021; Lynn, Butcher, et al., 2020; Lynn, Templeton, et al., 2020; Musengi & Musyoka, 2020; O’Brien et al., 2015; Ruiz, 2022). Universities in Sweden offer different more general kinds of disability study support to students with long-term disabilities, including such matters as read-aloud books, extra time for exams, advance insight into lecture PowerPoints, and so on. Support arrangements may also include adjustments to forms of teaching, but cannot entail substantive changes to assessment. If a formal support agreement is in place with deaf students, it also covers the provision of Swedish Sign Language interpretation.This requires applying for support with medical documentation and is administered by staff at university-based disability services. Students covered by the agreement can get a sign language interpreter for every situation related to their studies, including lectures, seminars, group work, excursions, laboratory work, study visits and some study-related student union activities. The sign language interpreters interpret between spoken Swedish/English and Swedish Sign Language. Universities can apply to a central location for student support costs that exceed 0.3% of the appropriation for undergraduate education.

A negative epistemics of deafness as barrier to access

Aside from practical study support, there remain, however, also deeper, less tangible matters that are often collectively referred to, by deaf students and deaf scholars themselves, as audism. As a deaf student clarified the term in a recent Master’s thesis, audism is ‘the treatment of deaf people as inferior on the basis of their deafness’ (Browning, 2023, p. 3). The term audism originated in a doctoral thesis by American deaf scholar Tom Humphries (1977). The term audism has spread across the field of Deaf Studies, being widely studied and deployed especially among deaf people as a good characterization of what deaf people encounter in a hearing world (Bauman, 2004; Branson & Miller, 2002; Eckert & Rowley, 2013; Jackson, 2019), including also in higher education (Ballenger, 2013; Brown, 2020; Johnson & Beck, 2022; Stapleton & Croom, 2017).

While general support and access arrangements – such as advance insight into lectures, audioloop systems that facilitate listening, and sign language interpreting – are often and readily taken into consideration (Brennan et al., 2005), claims about audism as itself a barrier to study are harder to verify and assess in a scholarly manner. The claims presuppose strong connotations with a negative and even oppressive attitude that by the very nature of the claims highlight discrimination: i.e. treating people as inferior on grounds of a group characteristic, namely their relative inability to hear. Reference to audism describes a situation that is roughly comparable to such notions as ableism, discrimination in favour of able-bodied people and prejudice against disabled people (N. Brown & Leigh, 2020; Parekh, 2023; Singer & Bacon, 2020) and even to white supremacy, which amounts to prejudice against non-white people and discrimination in favour of white people (Aronson & Meyers, 2022; Chávez-Moreno, 2020), both of which capture diversity-related concerns that also apply to educational matters. While they are less relevant to our own analysis, it is worth pointing out that these notions are at present giving rise, for example, to the application of Disability Critical Race Theory in education (Annamma et al., 2022; Migliarini & Elder, 2023), and they are therefore worth listing here as relevant context to our study. Audism, ableism and other examples of critical theory all tell of people’s different perspectives being engaged in unfair competition, in a struggle over recognition, and at worst being in outright conflict. In what follows, we seek an alternative description of access barriers of these particular kinds: matters that are not so obvious but can block deaf students’ good access to higher education and that could indeed be described as cases of audism from a deaf perspective.

A positive epistemics of deafness as potentially enabling access

We prefer the search for alternative description (i.e. something other than audism) because we have reasonable doubt about conceiving of access barriers being the product of a discriminatory attitude, even though discrimination may on occasion most certainly be a reasonable suspicion. We doubt that hearing people are much aware – in terms of personal identity politics – of being a member of an oppressive ‘hearing’ community. We see little reason to believe that hearing people think of themselves within an oppositional deaf/hearing schema of person politics; nor do we suppose that hearing people mean to assert a hearing superiority over deaf people, even though this may well be how it comes across to deaf people (Lane, 1992; Nario-Redmond et al., 2019). We are sooner inclined to suppose that hearing people have little deeper understanding of what it means to be deaf in a hearing world, and perhaps give the matter little thought. A common misconception in that regard is to conceive of deafness as ‘being a hearing person minus hearing’ (Thoutenhoofd, 2000), when it is often more helpful to consider deafness as giving rise to quite other ways of being in the world, both sensorially and cognitively (Ladd, 2003; Sacks, 1989).

This latter line of thinking highlights a fault line between hearing and deaf people that is epistemological in nature. Otherwise put, hearing people lack the deaf visual competence and ocular centred cognitive orientation that comes naturally to deaf people by way of their deafness. Deaf students bring both their hearing loss and their deaf cognition and learning competence into the university, with all the alternative skills, knowledge and sign-bilingual confidence that arise with hearing loss and deafness; but that different competence – often involving outstanding cross-modal communication skills – rarely meets with recognition and is in education much more typically treated as a ‘special need’, a term that seems a highly inappropriate double euphemism (Batstra et al., 2021; Wilson, 2002). Note that the distinction we make between hearing loss and deafness is on a par with the commonplace distinction in disability studies between impairment and disability: while able-bodied people are likely to prioritize the impairment, disabled people are likely to prioritize the consequences, both positive and negative, of disablement: in positive terms that includes shared experience, solidarity and community (Kafer, 2013; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018; Swain & French, 2000), and negatively it includes the constant encounter with social and material barriers, suffering lack of understanding and even oppression and discrimination (Campbell, 2009; Norberg, 2022). Likewise, while hearing people typically foreground hearing loss, deaf people are more likely to prioritize social, cultural and linguistic differences, and negatively a lack of understanding and accommodation that characterizes their primarily hearing surroundings – not them.

In what follows, we therefore seek to describe a gap between deaf students’ experiences of deafness and learning on the one hand, and university tutors’ assumptions about deafness and the study support they consider appropriate on the other. Such a description goes well beyond present student support arrangements (useful as they may be) and instead lifts out the difference between what deaf students know and value and what their tutors know and value, projecting this different knowing as itself a hindrance to learning.

Some comments on theory

The account above suggests a struggle over what and whose knowledge is taken into account, thus indicating an issue in social epistemology. Social epistemology addresses questions about knowledge under the assumption that knowledge is inherently social (Fuller, 2002). Knowledge matters because it is by and large instrumental, helping us to pursue our personal and collective goals (McConkey, 2004). Knowledge becomes a matter to be settled if what a person knows is not taken seriously or it is not taken into account (Fricker, 1998). When such happens structurally, that is, when what individuals or a community of persons know and value is ignored or lacking in recognition because of who they are, also in terms of social hierarchies and stratification – in spite of that knowledge being considered credible as such – then we can speak of epistemic injustice. In such cases, the credibility that members of a group deserve, such as, for example, deaf people, is not in keeping with the credibility that is actually given to them. Much more may be said about the notion of epistemic injustice (Anderson, 2012; Fricker, 2007, 2008; Lorenzini, 2022; Medina, 2012) but this general description probably suffices for considering it an alternative to the notion of audism.

While accounting for epistemic injustice seems relatively straightforward, there is an important distinction to be made between strictly principled accounts and more ‘archaeological’ practice-based or even evidence-based accounts of social epistemology (Fuller, 2002, p. xvii). Principled accounts – those which Fuller would denote as ‘phlogistemic’ – are truth-oriented or veritistic accounts, which assume that there is a right and wrong account of knowledge; we might hold that they are positivist in the sense of supposing that there is a single correct and verifiable outcome to an inquiry into the nature of knowledge and its relations with power. This then all too easily brings about a fairly mechanistic assumption that if an account of knowledge is wrongly deemed false, then there is a problem of accreditation, and a recognized body (such as a scholarly expert or community) might be allocated the task of independent adjudication. Fuller claims that such principled accounts lack sociological warrant. Being mostly within the domain of thought experiments, such accounts postulate causes (often starting in an original position of pure principle) in order to track effects. However, sociology teaches us that cause-effects are rarely, if ever, linear nor are they singular matters; so, the better route to clarification is to trace causes from known effects. It is precisely this latter that we attempt in what follows: we start in actual practice, describing cases in which what deaf students (as well as deaf staff) put forward as competence meets with a lack of recognition. By seeing those cases as outcomes of an underlying wrong, we reach back to a possible causal pattern in the social epistemology of epistemic injustice.

Some comments on methodology

Our description of deaf students encountering hindrance in higher education is therefore expressly set more in practice than in theoretically or data-driven scholarship. This also means that we give priority to the actual, the ‘what happens’ in our personal and professional experience. The cases thus seek out what might be termed ‘really real’ problems, seeking to lift out matters that are left hanging when the usual explaining and doing is done. We have come to call such matters ‘odd situations’ in passing, not in the least because the situations tend invariably to have an awkward and unsatisfactory ending in which matters are never really resolved nor explained and problems can easily repeat.

Our goal is therefore a form of case description that is decidedly less post-hoc than the reflexive analysis that follows, and that moreover derives from practical matters we were and are actually engaged in as academic tutors and scholars. Reference (citing others’ publications) is also mostly suspended in our case descriptions. This is not because we are unaware of others’ work and even less because we feel free from others’ work. We do so because the literature on the topics we address is both scarce, relatively dated, and often set out at a substantive scholarly and reflexive distance from what happens (even more so when studies are based on data), which inevitably brings about a large gap between what is known and what that knowing is factually based on; which is a problem of correspondence. We stay close to what happens, in our own experience and from our own perspective. In doing so, we may take methodological licence, but hopefully we gain a little in reducing the correspondence gap between world and scholarship, winning greater transparency. In terms of approach, we followed a narrative approach that aligns with Polkinghorne’s (1995) description of that: we gathered actual events and exchanges that we then analytically converted into an account of deaf students suffering epistemic injustice in accessing higher education.

With respect to trustworthiness, all three authors were professionally and directly involved in the cases and examples we describe as university tutors. Matters arising were discussed regularly with deaf students concerned in support meetings and in exchanges with various stakeholders and other university staff involved. Much of that is documented in email exchanges and in grey literature that collected in the process of handling matters. Feedback from deaf students on this text tells us that deaf students agree with and support our analysis, and it is their perspective that we seek to foreground.

Note that our cases are not based on data collected in a formal research project, but on odd situations we encountered as academic tutors, and on deaf students who have turned to as, as experts in the field, for support in resolving a grievance with their course tutors or university. What is presented here is therefore based on those actual encounters and expressly not an analysis of data collected in a formal research project. We discuss two cases. The first case concerns deaf students being failed on language courses in two universities, while the second case concerns sign language interpretation being withdrawn as support accommodation for deaf students, in online teaching situations that arose during the pandemic at one university in Sweden.

Case 1: deaf students are failed on language courses

Our first case concerns deaf students who enrolled in university language courses and who are there failed on assignments that assess listening and talking skills, to the point where they are forced to formally challenge those outcomes, or even had to abandon their studies. We here draw from three students that came to us in a single academic year. The three deaf students are in their mid twenties, self-identify as sign-bilingual deaf students who know more than one sign language and more than one spoken language. Two attended deaf schools, one attended regular school prior to university. All three students are at the time of writing still attending university and have given their written consent for drawing on the incidents we report. We will report on language course assessments that hindered the three students in the form of an experiment in position. We write in this form in part because the position experiment – in which we invite you to consider the case explicitly from a deaf perspective – allows us to rise above any one particular case and so retain case anonymity. But more importantly, it is fairly safe to assume that we write to a readership of mostly hearing people who find less occasion to consider matters of deafness in the very particular. Generally speaking, it is not at all easy to imagine the hardly visible yet effective resourcefulness that deaf students bring to learning, in their efforts to make up for the simple fact that university courses logically are primarily designed, delivered and accessed through speaking and listening. We moreover seek to suggest that a suitable grasp of what deaf students are fighting against, and fighting for, in seeking access to education involves that we re-assess knowledge claims and pay long overdue attention to what deaf students themselves know, both about being deaf and about ‘hearing’ habits and the markedly spoken language mode of mainstream education.

By a deaf student, we mean a student who has a severe or profound hearing loss, which in turn loosely denotes a hearing loss that is quite so serious that access to the primary modality of spoken language – speaking and listening – is a grave challenge or indeed fairly impossible. If it is a grave challenge, the deaf student may still associate with spoken language and be a spoken language user, although they may, or may not, use some form of signing or sign language in support. If talking and listening are quite impossible tasks, then the deaf student is more likely to be a sign language user. Deaf students may, or may not, use hearing aids or have a cochlear implant that will help them, to a greater or to a lesser extent, to access speech sounds. For both types of deaf student and whatever aids to hearing they prefer, the same will, however, most likely be true: their spoken language competence is to a far greater extent than for hearing students, the outcome of seeing the language, looking at the writing and working out, visually and from the patterns in writing, matters of lexis, grammar, and whatever else may help them achieve a good understanding of that language, both in terms of comprehension and production. Their spoken language grasp and use are succinctly more set in the visible, written form of the language. We kindly invite you to consider the visually oriented cognition indicated by such a primarily written spoken language world – a cognition that is substantively based on vision and learning to look and see how a spoken language works and hangs together; perhaps when compared to one’s native sign language, which is entirely visual-gestural, that has its very own and distinctive mouth patterns, and which has, incidentally, no written form. Deaf students may well have a partial or very little grasp of what the language they see in writing, and typically very much less so on the lips of speakers, actually sounds like. But while deaf students may have impaired access to oral and aural resources for learning, they tend to acquire comparatively strong skills in visual and gestural forms of learning instead.

As a deaf student, you have perhaps (if you were lucky) grown up in a sign-bilingual classroom, which has made sign language your native mother ‘tongue’ (or: hands). You have grown up with the country’s spoken language being taught to you in a mostly written form, by teachers trained to help you develop adjusted (i.e. more visual) learning skills. In exiting your secondary education, you are convinced – because your teachers have constantly reminded you of this, and your diploma also states it – that you are bilingual: competent in both your native country’s sign language and its spoken language (albeit in written form), and in general terms quite as competent and academically able as any other person your age and with that same diploma.

Then, you are accepted and enrolled in a university programme to learn a foreign language, but in time, perhaps not until your third year of study, you are failed in your university-level language learning assignments because you cannot hear the language and you cannot speak it. Moreover, that determination is made by hearing people who present to you as language scholars but who have at best minimal, if any at all, understanding of your prior education and how that was done; they typically have minimal, if any, understanding of what a sign language is and involves; and they often have at best superficial insight into the mostly hidden extra cognitive work that you have constantly and at great extra personal effort had to do, as a deaf student, to access their hearing and talking-oriented teaching alongside hearing, talking and listening students. There may be plenty of written text and writing tasks on offer, and you may have disability support and access arrangements for your learning, but teaching is nevertheless almost exclusively based on spoken language exchange, while you as a deaf student can only really make sense of this new language by looking at texts that come your way, looking at tutors, looking at your sign language interpreter, and looking around in the classroom, trying to figure out the patterns, meanings, structure, and so forth, of another language.

We suggest you imagine this, noting that deaf students do manage to learn new languages in that way. Our co-author Camilla is Swedish, Deaf (member of the Deaf community, a sign language user, and so forth) and an experienced academic; she is a Swedish Sign Language and written Swedish bilingual who is competent also in written English. Try to express, for yourself, what cognitive feat might be involved in deaf students managing, to a significant degree via looking and seeing, to learn a new language that they cannot properly hear or hear at all, in study settings designed around speaking and listening and where tutors know next to nothing about how deaf students learn. Then, imagine being failed for not being able to speak and listen and being told that this means you cannot become competent in the language; and that you can only abandon the course and perhaps your entire study programme, perhaps even lose your study grant. You exited secondary education as a certified, competent user of the country’s spoken language in written form, but now in university you are unceremoniously informed that you cannot learn a spoken language because you are deemed incapable of dealing with speaking and listening; you are failed, in short, because you are deaf—since facing barriers in speaking and listening is very precisely what deafness amounts to.

All of the above happens to deaf students in Sweden, and when they complain about it, they may well be reminded (as has happened in cases we have on file) that course syllabi are documents with legal force, so that language learning outcomes that stipulate listening and speaking competence are not subject to access accommodation requests. Learning goals may even likely reference the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR),² which standardizes language proficiency levels. Its descriptors indeed include speaking and listening skills, despite the Framework also covering sign languages (chapter 6 of the Framework). After you fail to pass an oral assignment you may also be told in written feedback that your tutor is convinced that you can do better in listening and speaking but that you are not trying hard enough, as happened in one case we have on file.

Out of the three cases reported to us within an academic year, two were deaf teacher training students whose programme included courses in teaching English; the third was a deaf student pursuing a degree in German language and literature. The cases were spread across two different universities and three different study programmes. For one of these students, ad hoc accommodations were made after a formal complaint. A second student’s complaint was formally rejected, and he had to exit the study programme and revise his career plan, after a complaint made to the regional discrimination ombudsman about being failed in his course was also not taken up. In the third and final case, a complaints procedure at the university supported the course tutors’ repeated fail grade, with university legal advisors formally backing up the decision. A complaint about the outcome was thereafter made to the regional discrimination ombudsman, but was there too not taken up. We ourselves sent a letter documenting all three cases to the Swedish Council for Higher Education (UHR), which has a complaints procedure for students with a grievance against their university. In the letter, we asked UHR to call for a national strategy that, at the very least, makes the accommodations that language tutors make for deaf students in relation to assessing speaking and listening skills nationally consistent. UHR answered that such is not a matter under UHR’s remit. Whether or not speaking and listening skills are waivered in language courses therefore depends on which university you go to as a deaf student.

Case 2: subtitling replaces sign language interpreting

Our second case focuses on the consequences for deaf students at one Swedish university when the corona virus pandemic combined with new national legislation on access entitlements. It catapulted the production and online use of pre-recorded teaching material in university courses. While the subtitling of video content is likely to benefit most students, in the implementation as it occurred at this particular university, it was presumed to be reasonable to take away deaf students’ entitlements to sign language interpreting whenever subtitling was made available. That is, there appeared to be no recognition of the fact that one language (Swedish Sign Language) was fortuitously replaced by another, the subtitles being in Swedish: subtitles and sign language captioning were thereby treated as much the same thing, with subtitling being cheaper and benefiting more students. The substitution was thus treated by those in charge as a rational choice. It seemed thereby to be supposed that what was expected by new access regulations for all students (subtitling), would be good enough also for deaf students.

However, according to the Swedish Language Act, Section 9, the public sector has a particular responsibility to protect and promote Swedish Sign Language. The Act also states that persons who are deaf or hard of hearing, and persons who, for other reasons, require sign language, are to be given the opportunity to learn, develop and use Swedish Sign Language. The university’s own guidance (retrieved 20 February 2024) notes that students who are deaf, hard of hearing or deafblind should be enabled to study on the same conditions as hearing students. Until the pandemic, the university had therefore provided sign language interpretation, real-time captioning/written interpretation and tactile sign language interpretation. Deaf students could moreover enlist an interpreter for everything related to their studies: lectures, seminars, group work, excursions, laboratory classes, study visits and certain study-related student union activities.

The radical shift to subtitling replacing sign language access under pandemic conditions of university study is described in detail in a book chapter (Adams Lyngbäck et al., 2021). The decision to replace sign language interpreting with subtitling resulted in ‘access denied’ conditions for deaf students already constrained by their university’s temporary closure, while feedback from those suffering the consequences of the new policy for deaf students – deaf students themselves, and deaf and hearing staff involved in teaching about deafness and deaf education – was consistently ignored. The experience of not being consulted led to staff members setting up a local working group on deaf, hard of hearing and sign language issues.

The lack of grip that the working group had on matters that were afoot seems of particular interest as an example of epistemic injustice. The group was self-organizing, informal, liminal and voluntary, yet keen to share its expertise and to be consulted. For the short time that it existed, the working group operated on a nexus of research and activism, in its efforts to advise and speak back to formal institutional arrangements on matters of deafness, sign language, and deaf students’ access to university study. The working group was a well-intentioned, but as it turned out ineffective and short-lived response to the incompetence-based marginalization of a linguistic minority group in higher education by university line management.

The university’s access administrators were well aware of what sign language is and what rights deaf students and staff have regarding sign language access. What they nevertheless lacked is access to what deaf students and staff can tell them from personal experience: that when study access in their native language is summarily replaced with subtitling in their second language, then this impairs rather than improves their particular study access: language access is removed, while the opposite is being claimed on their behalf by hearing staff, and deaf students suffer the further indignity of seeing their native sign language – supposedly protected and to be promoted – erased from access arrangements as if this were no big deal.

The events prompted a series of telephone calls to the university president’s office, emails to deans, following paper-trails of overly hastily issued directives, requesting information on how decision-making and advisory groups were appointed and represented and meetings convening hearing administrators and leaders with Deaf and hearing experts employed at the university. In all this checking and asking for attention and reconsideration, one outstanding matter quickly became self-evident: the views of deaf students and deaf staff did not matter. They were not in any way consulted or included in the deliberations of leaders, committees and advisory groups. When a deaf working group member inquired why the removal of sign language interpreting could not be resolved by asking the relatively small number of deaf students what they wished for, her question was not answered.

Deaf students in the meantime pointed out that the overly hasty subtitling of lectures, ranging from complex academic language to informal speech, can become extremely difficult to decipher for those who are not native users of the language. In addition, due to poor editing and handling of content arrangements, the subtitles could sometimes be nearly invisible and could often simply be overlaid on text or text slides being shown, thereby blocking important content. Deaf students reported to us having to resort to scrolling and scrubbing their way through their educational programmes in poorly accessible, sub-standard subtitled Swedish. Even worse, deaf students report being told that they could only still apply for sign language interpretation under a non-existent ‘additional disability’ to their deafness, which would then be on record. When applying as such, they typically had their requests rejected.

Even under normal, non-pandemic conditions of live lectures being live interpreted into sign language, deaf students make substantial additional effort to piece the sign language information together with the other visual information present in the lecture. These include the gestures, movements, eye-gaze and body language of the lecturer, as well as the graphic contents of slide presentations, and even the visual feedback from within the classroom that deaf students will try to read as information. These purely visual layers of sign language and people talking, of overheads, and all physical and spatial classroom information are stacked (they are co-present in both time and space) and this makes reading them a highly complex cognitive task even for deaf students used to processing large amounts of purely visual inputs. Deaf students in Sweden have a name for it: it is called ‘syssna’ in Swedish, a combination of the verbs to see and to listen. Deaf students have often explained to us what it means and what it takes to ‘syssna’, and it never fails to deeply impress us. It has made us realize the importance of what Logue (2013) calls the politics of unknowing and what a pedagogy of epistemic vulnerability would entail, in which hearing university staff imagine themselves in the place of deaf students and get to grips with deaf students’ visual orientation to learning.

When a pre-recorded lecture has been subtitled and is ‘therefore’ no longer deemed in need of sign language interpreting (in contrast to live lectures being live interpreted), deaf students no longer have the same, even less equitable, access to university study. That Swedish subtitling was determined to be an adequate replacement of interpretation into Swedish Sign Language is not only poorly conceived; not seeking to benefit from deaf students’ own experiences and perspectives moreover brings about an epistemic injustice that pivots on a typically hearing misunderstanding concerning language effort and access. It does not surprise us that deaf students consider it audism. Key to the problem is, however, that the hearing access providers do not know what they do not know – they give themselves no access to what deaf students know.

Discussion and conclusion

We return briefly to the first case. We hope that you were able to imagine being failed in your university language course from a deaf student perspective. Your teachers in primary and secondary school never told you that you could not acquire good competence in the country’s spoken language because you are deaf, because you cannot hear. They instead encouraged you to think of yourself as a sign-bilingually competent language user. Yet from the university tutor’s perspective, it surely does seem reasonable that students are able to speak a spoken language to good standard, and can understand it when hearing it being spoken. Moreover, those skills are stipulated by course syllabi, and those are in turn mapped onto a formal European framework of language competence. To us, this is typical of odd situations that arise, replete with clumsy engagements and deep mutual misunderstanding that deaf students seem to trigger in a university context of study. While these odd situations are openings that arise for discovering and exercising equitable moral and epistemic agency, they are inevitably also risky situations: people may do their very best, yet others may point out that their very best is experienced as oppressive and as wrong-doing. The very same events hold both the potential for greater epistemic equity and for further harm in terms of epistemic injustice, social exclusion and even discrimination.

Our discussion of odd situation may remind some readers of the so-called double empathy problem (Milton, 2012; Milton et al., 2022) which builds on the related idea of an empathy gap. The two notions challenge the validity of the suggestions that a lack of empathy arises with autism. The double empathy problem suggests that a perceived lack of empathy might stem from communication difficulties and different social expectations, not a fundamental absence of empathy. While this may well be the case, the value of knowing how the (Other) deaf person experiences the world includes valuing their experience in intercommunicative encounters which are imbued with issues of power (hearing norms). Power hierarchies, creating norms and expectations as well as what becomes taken for granted, will be a part of communicating in transmodal/translingual contexts. The social-cultural perspectives on language, which are part and parcel of Deaf Studies, point to how ‘odd situations’ are a vehicle to show how access issues are complex and require recognition of valuing deaf students as knowers, which is a shift towards epistemic reciprocity requiring different things from hearing and deaf interlocutors.

Closure also typically fails in these odd situations. Only in one of the three student cases we have discussed were assignment accommodations made by tutors, after consulting within the university department concerned. The accommodations allowed the deaf student concerned to proceed with her teacher training programme and avoid the speaking and listening requirements of her courses by demonstrating equivalent skills in sign language. The outcome, while positive for the student concerned, therefore remains awkward. It is not a solution that one would be inclined to adopt as a general access arrangement, but the accommodation does recognize deaf students’ different language capacity, rather than only their impairment. In the two other cases, students were offered no such accommodation, which raises further questions about equity and what students can in fact expect from their university when they start their study programme.

Our second case also tells of an odd situation, in which a positive access regulation to subtitle all pre-recorded teaching brings about worse access to deaf students already studying from home under pandemic conditions, because the regulation brought about a language-confused further local determination that sign language captioning is not needed when recordings are subtitled. What made this situation awkward was that those in charge of access arrangements failed to see how the different languages matter to deaf students, while at the same time engaging with neither deaf students nor with deaf staff in pushing the decision forward. Not knowing what they did not know and not knowing that they did not know, they did not see any point in asking deaf students for their input. We wish again to point out that in none of the cases we have set out was there, ostensibly, any ill will or insincerity with respect to seeking to provide good access. The odd situation seemed full of good will, yet reflected strangely one-sided ‘hearing’ lines of knowing and reasoning, and lacked very precisely a deaf perspective and access to what deaf students and staff know. That the ocular centred knowledge of deaf students, their lived experience of it, lacks epistemic recognition shows that there is variation in the forms of knowing; and that some of those forms may be fairly inaccessible, both cognitively and socially. By way of comparison, it seems more accepted that understanding black experience and what black people know needs scholarly work (Boyce et al., 2023; McCoy, 2020; Person & Christensen, 1996; Tichavakunda, 2023). Even so, it is doubtful that genuine deep understanding – a kind of epistemic as well as emotional empathy – is possible, since understanding too is inevitably set in a different social context. In our experience, hearing people have no such similar conception of deaf experience and visually oriented cognition meriting empirical study and active scholarly work, without a doubt due to it being inaccessible and difficult to grasp. It is far too often and wrongly supposed that deaf students are like hearing students without hearing, which is itself the outcome of a historical social politics of deafness as mere impairment.

In the context of university study and students needing to fight for their good access, knowing and reasoning are therefore ever susceptible to grave power differentials. This amounts to the recognition that epistemology is thoroughly social, deeply invested in power differentials, such as those that apply between hearing and deaf people, professionals and non-professionals, tutors and students, and so forth. University staff and tutors are typically much practiced in assessing what students know, but may often be much less attentive to how students know what they know, and in the case of students who depend on access arrangements, precisely what additional or compensatory effort that has involved. The epistemic recognition of such other ways of learning to know starts with admitting that whatever one’s professional expertise, one does not always know how others know or learn. One major obstacle to the epistemic recognition of deaf students’ different ways of knowing has been termed hearing fragility which indicates a problem of social relation. The reaction to finding out that as a hearing person (or other identity position in a dominant group) one’s knowledge and good intentions are incomplete or inadequate and result in discrimination or oppression, is then met with feelings of being hurt or angry. The focus then goes to consoling or disarming this person in power who ‘meant well’ but did not know better. Exhibiting fragility by occupying the position of being victimized, is then, more often than not, utilized to ward off having to acknowledge a collective harm to deaf individuals and Deaf culture. Applebaum (2017) names this as ethical and epistemological closure and (DiAngelo, 2011) explains fragility to be a consequence of being insulated from race-based stress where dominant knowers seldom come into contact with others’ experiences of racism. In the case of hearing fragility, there are arguably even less opportunities to develop the ability to deal with the discomfort of inequalities deaf people face and see one’s own responsibility for unintended harm. This reaction to losing face due to ignorance has implications for how deaf individuals are incapacitated as knowers, blocked by others’ invulnerability (Logue, 2013). How we learn to deal with this type of discomfort or remain invulnerable to social stratifications of knowing is related to whether there have been opportunities to develop a literacy of disability (Adams Lyngbäck, 2016) as a political and relational phenomenon. Within an epistemology of ignorance schema (Sullivan & Tuana, 2007) this would presumably implicate a combination of testimonial and hermeneutic epistemic injustice.

Epistemic injustice in the cases we described contains, further, an unintentional inversal, whereby access limitations remain in place when those inevitably hearing experts who are in control have, in the rhetorical and formative meeting place, no epistemic access to the different knowledge of the thereby excluded deaf students. This lack of access is partly explained by not spotting what they do not know, and is in part explained by a lack of vulnerability – tutors and staff adopting an overly confident ‘we are the expert (in what we teach)’, or ‘we know what we grade’ attitude. Under such epistemically superior or governing conditions of considering what needs to be taken into consideration, access to more complete information is not there because deaf students fail to be recognized as differently knowledgeable – sensorially, cognitively and in their communication modes – about matters that are directly relevant to securing good access, making it impossible to reach a shared consensus about, for example, a modally different orientation towards deaf students’ education and learning goals. This general lack of credentialing modal difference in cognition and knowledge seems moreover systemic rather than incidental, yet it seems rarely intentional as such. It is more precisely the consequence of a general lack of access, in higher education, to what deaf students, through far greater experience than others acknowledge, know about diversity in learning and modality in communication (McConkey, 2004). On a final note therefore, the structural attributes of unfairness (law, regulations, international agreements, course syllabi, etc.) seem in our view to outweigh individual culpability for the formative epistemic injustice that occurs (Nikolaidis, 2021).

Thinking forward

Currently, what is missing in Swedish higher education – and most likely also elsewhere – is a body or function where issues regarding study access are discussed by those actually using access services and for such a body or function to have formal warrant and formal influence, with transparent guarantees for recommendations issuing from such to be taken into account. What present support functions need is good access to the different knowledge and experience that students concerned have, but that neither hearing university staff nor hearing professionals involved in support services necessarily have or can safely presume to have, since such knowledge arises very precisely and only with being deaf (or hard of hearing). This entails wide recognition that being hearing and having expertise is insufficient to guaranteeing deaf students’ access to higher education. While challenging, a much similar claim has already been made in relation to deaf pupils benefitting from deaf teachers, for example (e.g. Humphries et al., 2017).

The formatively detrimental and harming form of formative epistemic injustice we have reported – and the results of educators not taking on board what deaf students know – can in our view be overcome only by proactive pursuit of epistemic justice, aimed at including deaf people (in this particular case) into those formal functons where decisions are taken that directly involve and concern deaf people.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It is commonplace in Deaf Studies literature to use a capital ‘D’ in reference to those Deaf people who foreground Deaf community membership, value Deaf culture and use sign language. Our focus is on the different cognitive resources that come with being D/deaf, most notably involving a radical form of ocularcentrism, cognition that centres on looking, seeing and visual information (Thoutenhoofd, 1996). The reason for avoiding the Deaf Studies convention here is that we do not wish to presuppose any self-identification among deaf students generally. Various of the deaf students and staff we write about are however socioculturally Deaf students and Deaf staff by self-identification.

2. https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages/level-descriptions