Abstract
This chapter explores how sign language-using deaf young adults in Bangalore, India “occupy” vocational training centers set up for disabled people. Bangalore has many such centers and as disability has become a concept of great interest to both the state and civil society, additional centers are emerging. “Occupy” here has three meanings: the first relates to administrators’ need for bodies to occupy seats in order to satisfy their funders’ desires for high numbers of trainees. As the number of physically disabled potential trainees has decreased, deaf trainees have become a significant source of numbers at these centers. As such, deaf trainees “occupy” seats. The second meaning relates to the ways that deaf trainees “occupy” these centers and recreate them in ways unintended, and often below the radar of, administrators and teachers. As most administrators and teachers do not know sign language and are unaware of deaf values and moral orientations, deaf trainees create their own pedagogical spaces in which they teach each other, share news, and discuss ways of developing as deaf people. The third meaning has to do with “occupying” time: these vocational training centers are often spaces of urgency and anxiety as deaf trainees frantically try to learn something in the aftermath of primary and secondary school educational experiences that have failed them miserably. This time of trying to learn something is often a time of intense waiting as trainees wait to learn skills and then wait to find employment. Utilizing ethnographic data, this chapter argues for the importance of understanding the multiple registers of how vocational training spaces are utilized.
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Notes
- 1.
The names of all individuals and NGOs have been changed.
- 2.
Going forward, I call each of the institutions that I am writing about an “NGO.” They are also called training centers and job placement centers. Similarly, I call deaf young adults who frequent these NGOs “trainees” although they are also called students.
- 3.
There are deaf children who emerge from school as fluent signers if they have access to sign language-using deaf peers, mentors, and/or family members.
- 4.
According to RCI, these numbers are estimated from the 2001 census and are most likely inaccurate.
- 5.
Vocational training has been seen as a crucial program for creating a skilled Indian labor pool in general (International Labor Organization 2003; World Bank 2008). According to a 2008 World Bank report, there were 10,000 students enrolled in vocational training in the 1950s and this number has increased to more than 700,000 students now enrolled in 5,253 public and private institutions. This report noted that 60 % of students were still unemployed 3 years after finishing their vocational training course, there was not enough government oversight of private programs, and there were also ambiguous and competing government certification schemes. In addition, education provided was deemed to be too narrow in focus and there was not enough connection between actual industries and the vocational training centers. These factors combined with a general decrease in industrial sectors have resulted in increasing unemployment.
- 6.
In many cases, disabled trainees learned sign language and attempted to communicate with their deaf peers. Deaf trainees often told me that they appreciated this effort and they often relied on disabled peers for help when they did not understand their teachers. However, most of my deaf interlocutors considered deafness and disability to be two separate categories and they identified as deaf and not as disabled (although they of course benefited from government disability certifications and other government disability schemes).
- 7.
In utilizing and highlighting the concepts of deaf sociality and deaf development, I am moving away from the concepts of Deaf culture, Deaf identity, and Deafhood as used by the Northern-based discipline of Deaf Studies (see Friedner and Kusters 2014 on the limitations of these concepts). Similarly, I do not use a capital D when writing “deaf” because my interlocutors did not do so.
- 8.
These training centers do not exist in all Indian cities and the existence of three large centers is rather unique to Bangalore. When I spent time in Coimbatore, a second-tier city in Tamil Nadu, I observed that such NGOs did not exist and that deaf people therefore depended on their families, neighbors, or extended social networks to find employment. As such there was a different structure of opportunity that existed: deaf people actively looked for employment instead of waiting for an NGO to find them a job.
- 9.
Many of my interlocutors had stories of never receiving employment placements and of waiting indefinitely. However, those participating in Vision’s BPO training were usually given jobs within a few months.
- 10.
Many of these interlocutors did not actually want BPO jobs. They wanted to be artists, designers, teachers, and autocad engineers. However, when they went to Vision to register, they were told that because they were deaf, they should work with computers and that a BPO job would be good for them.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all my interlocutors as well as the NGOs mentioned in this chapter for their generosity in allowing me to occupy their centers. I also thank Stefan Helmreich, Mara Green, and Annelies Kusters for thoughts and comments on different versions of this paper. And much appreciation to editors Pamela Block, Nick Pollard, Devva Kasnitz, and Akemi Nishida.
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Editors’ Postscript
If you enjoyed reading this chapter, we recommend both Melanie Yergeau’s Chap. 6 “Occupying Autism: Rhetoric, Involuntarity, and the Meaning of Autistic Lives,” which looks at misinterpretations of autistics’ communication, Chap. 24 “If Disability is a Dance, who is the Choreographer? A Conversation about Life Occupations, Art, Movement,” by Neil Marcus, Devva Kasnitz, and Pamela Block, as they all explore non-normative communication. Akemi Nishida in “Neoliberal Academia and a Critique from Disability Studies,” Chap. 10 takes a similar approach. Chapter 22 by Rikki Chaplin “Blindness and Occupation: Personal Observations and Reflections” makes an interesting comparison with Friedner’s on deafness.
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Friedner, M. (2016). Occupying Seats, Occupying Space, Occupying Time: Deaf Young Adults in Vocational Training Centers in Bangalore, India. In: Block, P., Kasnitz, D., Nishida, A., Pollard, N. (eds) Occupying Disability: Critical Approaches to Community, Justice, and Decolonizing Disability. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9984-3_14
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