Conference Program

In the healthcare sector, the inclusion of Deaf individuals remains a critical democratic challenge. Communication barriers frequently compromise equal access to care, thereby exacerbating health disparities for the Deaf community. This abstract examines the panel’s focus on Deaf inclusion as a democratic imperative, analyzing accessibility within Italian hospitals and the necessity of training healthcare personnel in Deaf culture and Italian Sign Language (LIS).

Drawing upon clinical experience and empirical research, this study highlights how linguistic and cultural misunderstandings—such as inaccessible centralized booking systems (CUP), opaque medical reports, and lip-reading obstructed by surgical masks—violate the constitutional right to health (Art. 32) and perpetuate social exclusion.

The Deaf community constitutes a distinct linguistic and cultural group, with LIS officially recognized under Law 71/2021. Nevertheless, hospital interactions often pathologize deafness rather than embracing Deafhood. Empirical insights derived from interviews with Deaf patients and LIS interpreters reveal significant systemic inefficiencies: anxiety stemming from misunderstandings, diagnostic errors, and social isolation. These factors contribute to poorer primary care outcomes compared to hearing populations (Fellinger, 2005).

Proposed strategies emphasize visual-centric approaches—including direct eye contact, optimal lighting, transparent masks, and simplified written communication—alongside the integration of cultural mediators and LIS interpreters, positioned laterally to maintain a patient-centered focus.

Mandatory Continuing Medical Education (ECM) provides nurses, physicians, and healthcare assistants (OSS) with the fundamentals of LIS (the manual alphabet and key signs such as "where is the pain?"), empathetic protocols, and cultural sensitivity. This approach transforms disability into a multidisciplinary asset. Furthermore, the post-COVID implementation of telemedicine featuring remote LIS interpreting enhances health equity. These initiatives align with the principles of democratic inclusion and foster participation, echoing the panel’s call for interdisciplinary dialogue across education, policy, and culture.

Italian Sign Language (Lingua dei Segni Italiana, LIS), used by the Deaf community in Italy and long recognized as an element of its intangible cultural heritage, represents not only a privileged tool for everyday communication but also an expressive medium for the production of information and knowledge within the Deaf community. In recent years, LIS has been increasingly involved in a process of dialogue with formal education through bidirectional translation practices: on the one hand, school texts in Italian are translated into LIS; on the other, thoughts, questions, and reflections originally expressed through signing are rendered into spoken/written Italian.

This contribution aims to analyze translational processes within educational interpreting and schooling contexts involving Italian Sign Language, both from and into LIS, in order to investigate the specific features of intramodal–intermodal translation of knowledge and information between languages of different modalities. To this end, a perspective grounded in sensory experience and in the reconstruction of textual meaning is not excluded but rather foregrounded, understood as the final act of reciprocal inclusion between Deaf and hearing individuals.

The paper deals with the neologism Deafhood, coined by the British deaf activist Paddy Ladd (1952–). This concept marks a pivotal shift in discourse on deaf people, reorienting the understanding of deafness from a predominantly medical model to a socio-cultural and identity-based framework. This article offers a contrastive analysis of the English suffixes -hood and -ness and their potential Italian counterparts -ità and -itudine. It investigates the translatability of the term Deafhood into Italian by assessing the viability of sorditudine as a morphologically and semantically appropriate equivalent. Then, from the viewpoint of linguistics there will be examined the capacity of the proposed Italian translation to convey Deaf cultural identity and status in contrast to the clinical notion of sordità (deafness). The theoretical framework discussed hitherto cannot ignore themes such as inclusion and democracy, fundamental cornerstones in the reflection on the relationship between the deaf and hearing communities.

The history of deaf education in Italy is one of inclusion combined with or alternated by isolation and differentiation (Stokoe, 1960; Chiricò, De Monte, 2025). In the past 50 years, general education in Italy has been profoundly transformed by laws tending to the inclusion of children with disabilities in mainstream education, creating professional roles to support their path to socialization and learning (such as support teachers and communication assistants; De Monte, 2023; 2025). However, despite the experience gained over the years, inclusion still seems far off for those students coming from a multilingual background or showing particular difficulties with spoken Italian. In the case of deaf students, these findings are also consistent with international literature on deaf literacy in spoken and written language. Deaf children, in fact, experience difficulties that are often correlated to the limits in the exposure to language, as well as possible differences in the way written and spoken languages are cognitively processed (Marschark, Knoors, 2020; Anastasiou et al., 2015; Fabbretti, Tomasuolo, 2006). Deaf children, later adults, thus experience limits in their opportunities, which is the opposite of what democratic learning should look like.

To better understand the social, cultural, and scholastic system in which deaf children grow, and the way in which it sets a background for deaf literacy, further investigation into the scholastic path of deaf children is necessary. In a recent research on the linguistic needs of deaf students in mainstream education in Italy, data were also collected on their family background, as well as the preparation of teachers on deaf-related topics and sign language. The results confirmed literacy problems in the deaf learners (De Monte, 2025; 2026), as well as the importance of building a solid network of prepared professionals around the deaf pupil. In Italy, such professionals are support teachers and communication assistants; the former are part of the school staff, the latter are hired only in case of children with specific communication issues, such as, often, deaf children. As the name recalls, communication assistants are hired to mediate communication within the classroom, often specializing in sign language and deaf-related issues. Given their preparation, they act in a way that is often similar to school interpreters. Yet, they are poorly considered professionally and economically, their formation lacking standard and their inclusion in the scholastic system often left to cooperatives that manage their allocation but not their recognition. As a consequence, deaf learners lose another chance for inclusion.

In this presentation, an overview of the national situation regarding the inclusion of deaf children in mainstream education will be provided to discuss the meaning of democratic learning in a context where languages are not equally represented nor accessible for deaf children. In support of the discussion, the first-hand experience of a deaf communication assistant with a bimodal bilingual background will be introduced and discussed, to show how scholastic dynamics and low professional recognition affect the well-being of deaf learners at school.

Disability Studies (DS) represent a horizon characterized by the interdisciplinarity of research fields engaged in examining paradigms for understanding and interpreting disability and its constructs (Albrecht & Seelman, 2003). Despite the differences among interpretative approaches, their shared premise is the move beyond an individual-medical view in favour of the social model (Oliver, 1996). The educational application of this approach, as expressed by authors associated with Disability Studies in Education (DSE), shifts the focus from individual deficits to barriers imposed by contexts (Barnes & Sheldon, 2007), promoting instructional design based on the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework (Rose & Meyer, 2002).

With convergences and divergences, Deaf Studies also move beyond the medical-individual model to investigate the cultural, linguistic, and social dimensions of deafness as a way of being in the world (Ladd, 2003; Bauman & Murray, 2014). This perspective, however, is largely absent from discourses and practices concerning the social and educational inclusion of deaf people. What can Deaf Studies contribute to theories and practices in deaf education, both internationally and nationally? Which aspects of UDL are most relevant for addressing the multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal challenges that frequently characterize the education of deaf students?

How might concepts such as “audism” (Humphries, 1975), “Deafhood” (Ladd, 2003), and “Deaf gain” (Bauman & Murray, 2014) contribute to uncovering inequalities, indirect discrimination, and subtle forms of marginalization that persist within Italian schools?

How might the adoption of Deaf epistemologies, alongside the presence of Deaf academics, serve to mitigate manifestations of mistrust toward the educational experiences of Deaf families with Deaf children, or regarding deaf young people’s access to higher education?

This contribution aims to examine the principal trajectories initiated by international Deaf Studies in education, their intersections with the emerging italian strands of Disability Studies (Goodley et al., 2018), and the most promising UDL guidelines for implementing inclusive instructional design for deaf students in a practical and achievable manner.

Beyond the general inclusive principles of UDL - such as the right to equitable access to contexts and content - this framework is particularly valuable for accessible teaching practices for deaf students, as it provides guidelines for designing and implementing curricula and materials aligned with their learning styles. These range from “Designing Multiple Means of Engagement” (for example, addressing identity and the valorization of different languages and cultures, which is especially relevant for signing Deaf students and/or those from multilingual family contexts), to “Designing Multiple Means of Representation”, which offers essential guidance for producing accessible learning materials, and finally to “Action & Expression”, a principle encouraging all learners to express their ideas and knowledge through multiple means and modalities (including different languages, communicative systems, and codes, ranging from structured sign languages to digital expressive forms) (Baroni & Des Dorides, 2025).

This paper stems from the consideration of arts, specifically performing arts, as expressive possibilities to be enhanced in educational contexts, in the optic of building a more inclusive and democratic society. The process of aesthetic reception and creative production highlights the experiential and relational dimension, gathered from John Dewey's studies on the connections between art, experience, and nature.

The path proposed here offers food for thought and critical references on the centrality of the body and on corporeal listening in theatrical and educational relationships. In the pedagogical field listening is considered an indispensable condition in order to build educational dialogue, whereas in theatrical relationships listening appears as a direct consequence of the actor’s communication, which seems to arise on stage from silence.

Often focused on what reaches the audience from the stage, we forget that what the performer offers is the product of listening. The actor's body is one that presents itself to the spectator's gaze, a "speaking" and "acting" body, but we forget that it is, first and foremost, a body that “feels."

A contemporary theatrical production has highlighted how listening is an essential aspect of performance and how this ability is not the result of mere cochlear competence but rather of a widespread sensoriality. Deserving of particular consideration are the works of two deaf artists: Vincenzo Cannavacciulo aka Bobò and Christine Sun Kim. Bobò (1936-2019) was an Italian deaf-mute artist that worked with Pippo Delbono’s company since the play “Barboni” of 1997 until death. Christine Sun Kim (1980-) is an American deaf sound artist, performer, and activist based in Berlin.

The comparison of the performances of these two artists, very different in background and poetic language, aims to offer a glimpse on how the artistic practices of deaf people can overturn stereotypes about deafness and open new horizons for research in social pedagogy, in Deaf and Performance Studies, and ultimately inspire new approaches in social policies and offer new tools for educational governance.