The International Conference in Deaf Geographies
27 & 28 June, 2016
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester NY
https://www.rit.edu/cla/deafgeogconference/
REGISTER TODAY!
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Mary Beth Kitzel
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Mary Beth Kitzel
Virtual (and transnational) Deaf Space
Today, I met Siglinde Pape, of Laboratoire de Recherche sur le Langage, Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand (France). Siglinde visited one of my classes and told us a little about a project she is working on to bring together ASL signers and LSF signers to teach each other their sign and written languages – ASL, LSF, French, and English.
It captured my attention as the project is creating a virtual Deaf Space, an E-space, for the purpose of education. It represents a new form of Deaf-authored Space. The potential for research here is very exciting.Here’s a link to the project: http://signescale.wordpress.com/
And another to a report about the project: https://edutice.archives-ouvertes.fr/edutice-01068052
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Mike Gulliver
The Field School in Deaf Geographies – and the international Workshop on Deaf Geographies
The last month has been incredibly busy in the Deaf Geographies world… from the 12th of June, the inaugural Field School in Deaf Geographies, ran for 4 weeks, this was followed by the first international Workshop on Deaf Geographies.
Hosted by Queen’s university Canada’s Bader International Study Centre (BISC) and directed by Mary Beth Kitzel – contributor to this blog, BISC faculty and PhD candidate at Sussex, the Field School was an enormous success, and promises to be the first of many.
I hope to get some student voices on the blog to tell you more about the impact of the school soon.
Following the Field School, the first international Workshop on Deaf Geographies was held, also at BISC. Drawing participants and presenters from the UK, Ireland, the US, and Canada, the workshop included student presentations from the Field School, and papers on different and emerging areas of Deaf geographies, and offered an opportunity for discussion of the challenges and opportunities facing the field, and its possible futures.
More information on the workshop will be available soon too… but, in the meantime, if you want to read back through some of the live tweets, then search Twitter for #deafgeogs.
We have to say an enormous thank you to BISC who hosted us, and who have provided enormous and generous support to our work. Without their help, the Field School and workshop would probably not have happened.
We’re currently working through the material gathered… and we’ll be back to share it soon.
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Mike Gulliver
Deaf Geographies talks in Edinburgh – 5th and 6th March
In case anyone is interested – I’ll be presenting at Heriot Watt in March.
On the 5th, I’ll be at EdSign – https://sites.google.com/site/edsignlectures/ presenting on
“Deaf space – a tool for Deaf community empowerment”
Imagine for a moment that, somewhere in the world, there was a continent where visual communication was the norm, and where deaf and hearing communicated by sign… where homes and streets and workplaces were based on visual lives, communications technology was visual first, and where knowledge was stored in books written in a form of sign… where national language differences were easy to overcome, and where visual communication rules defined conversation, business and politics.
Imagine, for a moment, the impact that discovering a continent like that would have on our assumptions about what it means to be ‘deaf’… or ‘disabled’.
My talk explores some of these ideas, and looks at how the idea of a ‘Deaf space’ can be used as a tool for Deaf community empowerment.
On the 6th, I’ll be at the university – presenting on “Deaf Geographies: an emerging field”.
Signing Deaf people do not primarily describe themselves as those disabled by an inability to access hearing spaces. Rather, they inhabit Deaf spaces that are produced as regular contexts such as community centres, long-term Deaf families and schools for deaf children, and irregular opportunities such as national and international Deaf meetings allow opportunities to come together, author Deaf languages and cultures, and transmit them from one generation to the next.
Research into the Geographies of this Deaf community have recently emerged as one of the most exciting, developing areas of Human Geography: drawing together fields such as embodiment, performances of the environment, communication and sensescapes and viewing these through the eyes of a community who perform their cultural and social geographies in the visual.
This presentation outlines the emergence of Deaf Geographies, and explores ways in which geographical approaches based on the production of ‘Deaf spaces’ both compliment, and interrogate more traditional identity-based models of Deaf community.
I’m not sure if the Deaf Geographies presentation is open to the public…
Deaf geographies sandbox 
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