PhD position in Applied Social Studies; 48 months, full-time
CODA: A hidden minority amongst the majority: An ethnographic study of hearing Children of Deaf Adults and the negotiation of threatened social identities The School of Applied Social Studies and Institute of Social Science in the 21st Century (ISS21) at University College Cork are seeking to recruit a highly motivated and outstanding doctoral researcher for a period of 4 years (48 months).
Closing date has been extended – if interested, contact Dr Noel O’Connell (NOconnell@ucc.ie) The person appointed will conduct an innovative PhD project that will consist of an ethnographic study of hearing children of deaf adults (CODAs) in Ireland and the United Kingdom (UK), their experience of the courtesy stigma of parental deaf identity, and the ways in which they use culture and shared experiences of community belonging as resources for agency, resilience and empowerment. Funded by SFI-IRC Pathway Programme, the CODA project employs the methods of ethnography, participant observation and film documentary to gather data. The aim is to understand how CODAs experience identity and courtesy stigma (or stigma-by-association) in different social, cultural, educational and gendered contexts. The project addresses a fundamental gap in stigma studies which often focus narrowly on individuals with stigmatized identities without taking account of the ripple effect on family members. The research builds on emerging research phenomenon on children whose parents bear stigmatised identities (e.g. mental illness, same sex-marriages, criminality, incarceration, and other types of parental disabilities). Parents bearing stigmatised identities are generally perceived to have failed to live up to what society considers to be “normal” parental roles and the general public tend to perceive their children as in some way “contaminated” by the stigma. Deafness and sign language may operate as visual cues for stereotyping leading to discrimination against deaf parents which impact on their children’s lives. The stereotype content of deafness stigma frames deaf people as intellectually inferior, incompetent, helpless, uneducable and lacking in responsibilities.