Frankly, most essays in MBA or almost any social science school can be outsourced to AI with a small context window so teachers need to get more creative; either force people to read more papers (larger context window) or make certain checkpoints throughout the assignment that need to continue context from previous portions in some specific ways.
Deaf Studies is a small field. The experts mostly know each other personally. The lecturer cites a study, and then mentions that she was visiting the author last month, and describes chatting with the author's trilingual young child. The lecturer wrote the main textbook you ought to be citing, or perhaps their close friend did. Hallucinating citations would not work. I doubt that Open AI would be in any way helpful.
(Besides, I actively enjoy putting words together, and had a genuine love of the subject.)