In the near future, any sound above a whisper can kill. At least that’s the premise of the new film A Quiet Place, starring Emily Blunt and the film’s director John Krasinski. The film follows the Abbott family in a post-apocalyptic future, where blind aliens with incredibly sensitive hearing track their prey — in this case, the human race — by hearing even the smallest sound. The Abbotts manage to avoid attracting the aliens’ attentions because with a deaf daughter, played by Millicent Simmonds, they’ve learned to largely communicate using American Sign Language. Following critically-acclaimed films like Wonderstruck, The Shape of Water, The Tribe, The Silent Child, and Baby Driver — A Quiet Place is the latest in a growing list of movies in recent years to feature main characters who are deaf or exhibit some form of hearing loss. Morning Shift talks to Lennard Davis, a professor in the English Department in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a specialist in disability studies, about this cinematic trend.