“Is deafness subject to analysis, objective examination, scholarly discourse, scientific discourse or is it only apprehensible in the form of theatre, storytelling or experience?… Perhaps this is also one of the reasons why it is so difficult to talk about deafness and why one rushes so quickly to find ways to overcome it. »

Bernard Mottez, 1994, “L’expérience de la surdité”, an appendix document for the CEMS internal seminar of February 3, 1994, unpublished.

This site contains articles, lectures and documents that I have been able to present since 1981 on deafness and deafblindness and that retrace my journey between activist life and professional life alongside the Deaf community. I thought I would publish these documents because they seemed to me to provide some guidance on the evolution of the way of life of Deaf and Deafblind people and the relationship between Deaf and hearing people since the last quarter of the 20th century. Through this contribution, I hope I have not deviated from the spirit of Bernard Mottez’s remark, which sums up his approach to the issue so well and which I have always wanted to make my own: giving primacy to the relationship rather than to the thing.

Alexis Karacostas