9 1Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂ

Kerri Heng is passionate about qualitative research in disability and mental health. A recent graduate of the Master of Arts in Sociology programme at Nanyang Technological 9 1Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂ, her Master's thesis examined disabilities, identities, and employment experiences in Singapore. For her undergraduate honours thesis, she studied the social barriers faced by university students with hearing loss in Singapore. In the near future, Kerri hopes to pursue a PhD in Public Health, Sociology, or Medical Anthropology. 

For the video recording of this presentation, please see the online symposia page.

I was born with hearing loss in both ears and visual impairment in my left eye, but I was politically and socially uninformed. I didn't see myself as a person with disabilities due to my upbringing and socialisation among, for the most part, persons without disabilities. I went to mainstream schools and my first job out of secondary school was in a mainstream work environment. To use social model terminology, perhaps I was impaired but not disabled. I was ignorant of the ability privileges I had; the ability to speak, enough hearing to carry out conversations smoothly at close range, enough sight to read text in print and digital formats, and overall physical abilities.

In 2016, I was a Sociology undergraduate taking a course titled Deviance and Society.

My professor, Prof Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir from Nanyang Technological 9 1Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂ, introduced the class to Erving Goffman's seminal 1963 book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. That class also expounded the medical, charity, and social models of disability. All of a sudden, like lighting, it struck me that I fully qualified as a person with disabilities! My impairments clearly fit the medical definitions of disability, and I experienced some stigma and discrimination while growing up. For example, the loss of friendships in secondary school because I couldn't hear my classmates so well, and the loss of grades for a test in polytechnic, because I did not hear one additional question that was verbally spoken and not printed on the test paper. Goffman's work on stigma made complete sense to me and that marked the start of my identification as a person with disabilities, and the start of my disability research journey.

Coincidentally, the same Deviance and Society professor taught my qualitative research class, also in 2016. We were asked to brainstorm project ideas for our honours thesis, and borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu, I decided to make the banal exotic. When brainstorming, I realised three things: 1) My struggles with hearing loss were socio-relational, 2) Most people, that is, able-bodied people, wouldn't know about these struggles, and 3) I couldn't have been the only student with hearing loss in university. There must be others like me!

Adopting the social model of disability (which was all I knew at that time), I decided to work on an honours thesis titled: Understanding the social barriers faced by university students with hearing loss in Singapore. I conducted in-depth interviews with fellow undergraduates with hearing loss, university disability support staff, and one lecturer who had a student with hearing loss. I identified university settings that posed challenges for students with hearing loss, such as hearing in lecture halls and hearing enough to participate effectively in class discussions. 

Upon graduation in 2017, I secured a job as a research assistant at Singapore's Centre for Ageing, Research, and Education. There, I learnt more about disabilities, albeit from a more medical and gerontological perspective. I was surprised to find that one of my older adult research participants had very little hearing, which I completely empathised with. She was literate in Mandarin Chinese and she spoke in Cantonese. I conducted an in-depth interview with her by writing out my interview questions in Chinese characters and with her verbalising her answers in spoken Cantonese, which I audio recorded and translated. That was my most memorable research experience with older adults.

In 2019, I worked part-time at Trampolene, an organisation which supports youths with autism in social communication and employment. Also in 2019, I volunteered together with a team of researchers at Singapore’s Disabled People’s Association to compile a parallel report for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). These experiences solidified my interest in pursuing disability research at higher degree levels. 

In 2020, I embarked on a Master's degree in Sociology, where I researched identities, disabilities, and employment experiences in Singapore. I shall not reveal too much about this work, as I’m planning to publish it in journal articles. All I can say is that I adopted a moderate social constructionist framework in exploring the labelling of persons with disabilities and the work-related consequences of such labelling. Invoking the famous Thomas Theorem, labels are social constructs, but they are real in their consequences.

I have graduated and am now working part-time in a new research consultancy, Anthro Insights. My boss, Issac Lim, who has a PhD in Education from Oxford, got me to read Tom Shakespeare's 2014 book, Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited. I am now learning even more about disability studies then I have ever been. Particularly, the critical realist approach to disability strikes me as profound and I'm excited to learn more about it.

These days, I spend my free time planning for a PhD. Would I take a critical realist approach to disability for my PhD, or would I draw from various approaches? Would I pursue a PhD in Sociology, Medical Anthropology, or Public Health? The road ahead is unknown, but I am excited to continue my disability research journey.