Announcement Calenda 1166702
To mark the centenary of the first International Silent Games in Paris and the creation of the Internationale sportive des sourds in 1924, the Handicap & Sociétés Program and the " Deaf Studies in Question" research collective, in partnership with the Programme prioritaire de recherche (PPR) Autonomie and the Fédération Nationale des Sourds de France (FNSF), are pleased to invite you to the colloquium: Le Sport des Sourds, d'hier à aujourd'hui, est-il un sport de combat?
A century after the first International Silent Games in Paris (August 10 to 17, 1924) and the creation of the Internationale sportive des sourds (August 16, 1924), France and the city of Paris will host the thirty-third Olympic Games and the seventeenth Paralympic Games in 2024. Born a few decades before the Paralympic Games (Rome, 1960), which themselves stemmed from the 1948 Stoke-Mandeville Games, the International Silent Games are the culmination of a practice that has been favored by the Deaf since the end of the 19th century.
On this occasion, we propose to revisit a history little explored by the humanities and social sciences, that of the Deaf sports movement and its political anchorage in the "silent" movement since the end of the 19th century. Far beyond sporting practices, it is a history of struggles and resistance by the Deaf to preserve their language and their spaces of sociability and transmission of sign language in the face of the advance of the dominant oralist ideology since the end of the nineteenth century, which is of interest to the Deaf (Benvenuto & Séguillon, 2014). Tracing the historical contours and perspectives of Deaf sport is also an attempt to understand the complex links that Deaf athletes still maintain today with the handisport and parasport movement (Meziani & Séguillon, 2020; Séguillon, 2022). The aim is to examine the political issues at stake in the current debates surrounding the institutional organization of the Paralympics and Deaflympics.
Bringing together players from the world of research and the Deaf and Paralympic sports movement, the symposium will examine the political, historical and cultural stakes of these sporting events, with regard to the place our contemporary societies reserve for those who all too often occupy the margins of our communal lives.
