Language, Power, Deafness, and Alexander Graham Bell

Wednesday, July 21, 2021 | 6:30 p.m.

When writer Katie Booth was growing up as a hearing child with deaf grandparents, Alexander Graham Bell was assailed as a villain, a eugenicist who treated deafness as a handicap that must be cured by forcing deaf children to speak and attempting to eradicate sign language and other aspects of deaf culture. In Gallaudet University Professor Brian Greenwald’s family, Bell was hailed as a hero who enabled deaf kids like him to get an education. The dichotomy is part of Bell’s complex life and legacy, a complexity explored in Katie Booth’s new book The Invention of Miracles. Join Booth, Greenwald, and Gallaudet historian William Ennis for a Planet Word conversation about Bell, deafness, language, and who gets to shape history.

This program will be presented in ASL, spoken English, and English captions

You can purchase Katie Booth’s book The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness here.