New PhD on Deaf Geographies in Mexico City

Last week, on Thursday, it was my honour to take part in Gabriel Tolentino Tapia’s thesis ‘defence’ (in Mexico, by Zoom!). It was a great opportunity for Gabriel to explain his work and for the jury and the audience to ask questions. The viva was held in Spanish and Mexican Sign Language. Many of the questions and comments came from deaf people in the room and online.

Gabriel’s work is the first work (that I’m aware of) to explore deaf geographies in Spanish. It builds on extends thinking on deaf spaces and places in previously unexplored ways. Of particular note is his work (reminicient of Kusters’ work on Indian Railways) on deaf ‘Vagoneros’ and how they constitute ‘linear’ spaces and zones in the Mexico City metro. There’s also some opening up of deaf geographical theory to a more performative level in discussion of how deaf people construct their spaces strategically, and a conclusion in which he links the integrity of deaf spaces to the ‘native’ ingredient of sign language.

The PhD is in Spanish, but Deepl doesn’t do a bad job of translating it.

I’ve uploaded the entire Thesis (pdf, 6 Mb) to the Resources page, along with one spin-out article by Gabriel (Tolentino Tapia 2022), and an article by a deaf student of his on historical deaf places in Mexico city (Arellano Hernández (2020).