REGIMES OF MOBILITIES: DEAF DEVELOPMENT, NGOS AND DEAF TOURISM IN CAMBODIA

Inequities in deaf (and hearing) mobilities have allowed for global technologies and ideologies originating in the global North to have powerful effects among deaf people in the global South. These global forms travel to locations in the global South through development projects, the travel of “experts,” including sign language linguists, deaf educators, and consultants with disability-related expertise. Deaf–related “expertise” also travels in the person of deaf tourists, who carry their own ideologies about deafness and seek out deaf people and deaf spaces as a part of their “authentic” tourism experience. Recent work in mobility studies has called for attention to the differential and multiple forms of power that shape the categories of mobility and settlement as technologies and mobilities cross the globe. This dissertation examines the processes that circulate specific discourses and practices about deaf people and signed languages through Cambodia and the reterritorialization of these discourses and practices there.In the context of contemporary Cambodia, there are several types of mobilities—deaf people who travel from their rural villages and become a part of a network of deaf people in Phnom Penh; people who come to Cambodia to do development work; and tourists and the touristed. To better understand mobility through ethnography, this dissertation examines the processes that circulate specific discourses and practices about deaf people and signed languages through Cambodia and the reterritorialization of these discourses and practices in Cambodia, and by whom. Two major types of international mobilities have had an impact on deaf Cambodians: non-governmental organizations (NGOs) carrying out development projects and deaf tourists traveling through Cambodia. Cambodia presents an interesting case study of the mobility of ideas and people on various levels because of the intervention of NGOs in the lives of deaf people in the form of the invention of a signed language and the deliberate attempt to form a Deaf community. When humanitarian workers arrived in the 1990s to work with people with disabilities, they claimed couldn’t find any evidence of a deaf community or a national sign language in use. Over time, NGOs became conduits for “foreign expertise” in the form of ideas about deaf people and sign languages, as well as spaces where these ideas are contested. Mobility is not a new phenomenon; throughout history, people, things, and ideas have moved in different directions at different scales for different purposes. As Cambodia became more stable politically, it became an attractive destination for tourism, a different form of mobility. Deaf tourists began flocking to Cambodia, bringing with them certain ideologies about deaf people and sign languages. Recent work in mobility studies has called for attention to the differential and multiple forms of power that shape the categories of mobility and settlement, such as the movement of “elite travelers” as opposed to refugees or economic migrants. In the context of contemporary Cambodia, there are several types of mobilities—deaf people who travel from their rural villages and become a part of a network of deaf people in Phnom Penh; people who come to Cambodia to do development work; and tourists and the touristed. To better understand mobility through ethnography, this dissertation examines the processes that circulate specific discourses and practices about deaf people and signed languages through Cambodia and the reterritorialization of these discourses and practices in Cambodia, and by whom. This dissertation deals with the movement by which social and political ideologies and practices move from certain locations in space and time and the reterritorialization of these mobile social and political ideologies and practices. It considers how regimes of mobilities result in the uneven reterritorialization of specific ideas about deaf people and signed languages in Cambodia and how these ideologies devalue the everyday languaging practices of deaf people in Cambodia. Finally, this dissertation interrogates how the “invention” of languages results in distinctions between groups and individuals, especially in terms of access to “elite” linguistic resources such as national signed languages and the use of “non-elite” modalities such as gestures, pointing, and homesign.