Passing for recognition – deaf children’s moral struggles languaging in inclusive education settings

ABSTRACT Critical theoretical approaches to the concept of recognition emphasise the Hegelian concept of a morally motivated struggle to obtain an identity that can be characterised as authentic. This paper takes the concept of a struggle for recognition, Erwing Goffman’s concept of “passing”, and the cross-disciplinary concept of languaging as its theoretical points of departure. Data from two empirical studies – one of children with cochlear implants in a school for the deaf and one of these children languaging with typically hearing peers – are presented. The data show that the deaf children in the mainstream kindergarten and school frequently display the behaviour that Goffman coined passing: they pretend to understand, strive to appear as if they were typically hearing, and deploy a range of strategies designed to conceal that they have trouble understanding their peers. Goffman’s work on passing is combined with the data at hand in order to understand passing both as a challenging and exhausting activity and as a symptom indicating that the deaf children experience stigma in Goffman’s sense. Passing can be understood as a struggle for recognition, but since passing is a strategy at odds with the idea of an authentic identity presupposed in Critical Theory, behaviours of passing might be understood as a moral problem that can be displayed and analysed in various ways. The paper concentrates on questions of what Axel Honneth calls “solidary recognition” and suggests that the methodological implications of the way that children’s languaging practices are approached should be subjected to further investigation.