“Truly, the Deaf community is a treasure to be found,” says local Deaf artist, Renca Dunn.

September is Deaf Awareness Month, a time to increase public awareness about Deaf culture. As the only school in Nebraska that offers a bachelor’s degree in sign language interpreting, this is meaningful for UNO.

“It’s not necessarily a world without sounds but a visual one for me,” says local artist Linsay Darnall Jr.

Darnall Jr. explains his experience: “The only negative experience that I had was from the others and their framing of Deaf people. I don’t use words such as ‘hearing impaired’ or ‘hearing loss’ because they have a negative connotation that enable the public to perceive us in a way that we are lacking something, that we need help. I use capital letter D to describe myself as a Deaf person. It invokes a sense of pride and community. An identity. It’s more a sense of ethnicity according to my experience.”

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