Annelies Kusters

Beyond languages, beyond modalities: transforming the study of semiotic repertoires

ABSTRACT This paper presents a critical examination of key concepts in the study of (signed and spoken) language and multimodality. It shows how shifts in conceptual understandings of language use, moving from bilingualism to multilingualism and (trans)languaging, have resulted in the revitalisation of the concept of language repertoires. We discuss key assumptions and analytical developments that have shaped the sociolinguistic study of signed and spoken language multilingualism as separate from different strands of multimodality studies. In most multimodality studies, researchers focus on participants using one named spoken language within broader embodied human action. Thus while attending to multimodal communication, they do not attend to multilingual communication. In translanguaging studies the opposite has happened: scholars have attended to multilingual communication without really paying attention to multimodality and simultaneity, and hierarchies within the simultaneous combination of resources. The (socio)linguistics of sign language has paid attention to multimodality but only very recently have started to focus on multilingual contexts where multiple sign and/or multiple spoken languages are used. There is currently little transaction between these areas of research. We argue that the lens of semiotic repertoires enables synergies to be identified and provides a holistic focus on action that is both multilingual and multimodal.

Gesture-based customer interactions: deaf and hearing Mumbaikars’ multimodal and metrolingual practices

ABSTRACT The article furthers the study of urban multilingual (i.e. metrolingual) practices, in particular the study of customer interactions, by a focus on the use of gestures in these practices. The article focuses on fluent deaf signers and hearing non-signers in Mumbai who use gestures to communicate with each other, often combined with mouthing, speaking and/or writing in different languages. The data were gathered through linguistic ethnography in markets, shops, food joints and public transport in Mumbai. Within gesture-based interactions, people with sensorial asymmetries (i.e. deaf vs. hearing) combined the visual-gestural modality and certain features of the auditory-oral modality, and/or switched between modalities. Interlocutors thus orient towards the ongoing interaction and negotiate the constraints and possibilities imposed not only by different modalities but also by different sensorial access to these modalities.

Understanding Deafhood: In Search of Its Meanings.

The authors argue that Deafhood (a term coined by Dr. Paddy Ladd) is an open-ended concept with an essentialist core. They describe how deaf people who have attended their Deafhood lectures and workshops have perceived different aspects of the Deafhood concept, and compare the basic tenets of Deafhood and criticisms on Deafhood to theories and criticisms on feminist essentialisms. The authors find that the vagueness and wideness of the Deafhood concept is one of its strengths, though they also find that it is in some respects problematic to combine and unite ontology and liberation theory in one concept. They further suggest that the ontological aspects of Deafhood need to be foregrounded. The question of essentialism inherent in the Deafhood concept is also briefly discussed with regard to hearing people, the use of spoken language, and the use of amplification technology and cochlear implants.

“Our hands must be connected”: visible gestures, tactile gestures and objects in interactions featuring a deafblind customer in Mumbai

ABSTRACT This article is based on the analysis of customer interactions of Pradip, a deafblind man, with street sellers and shopkeepers in Mumbai. Pradip made use of visible and tactile gesturing including pointing at and tapping on objects (to indicate them), using emblematic gestures, and tracing the shape of objects on the hand. The fact that the sensory ecology is not reciprocal for the interlocutors is crucial for our understanding of what interaction means in these contexts. The material contexts themselves exert pressure on practices because of the constraints they pose for Pradip and his interlocutors; and routine/patterned ways of interacting in those contexts also exert pressure on practice: conventionalised schemes for customer interactions do not necessarily work in interactions between a deafblind and hearing sighted person. Pradip, as an experienced customer, negotiated the lack of shared conventional mechanisms for coordinating and signalling attention by abundant repetitions and by establishing tactile contact either immediately prior to, or during the utterance, including the production of signs on the interlocutor’s hand. The study thus shows that an experienced customer can successfully initiate new participant frameworks, without naturalising the constraints that are negotiated.

Deaf sociality and the deaf Lutheran church in Adamorobe, Ghana

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of “deaf sociality” in Adamorobe, a village in Ghana, where the relatively high prevalence of hereditary deafness has led to dense social and spatial connections. Deaf people are part of their hearing environment particularly through family networks, and produce deaf sociality through many informal interactive practices which take place in “deaf spaces”. In this context, efforts by the Deaf Lutheran Church to institute deaf-only signed worship services and (development) projects have been unsuccessful. Deaf community members are a priori socialized into practices of deaf sociality through deaf spaces and see little or no need for this set of practices which bring them few benefits. Furthermore, collective structuring, social security, social work, interpreting and leadership rather happen in the context of lineages and extended families—where sign language is used—rather than in deaf-based support networks.

Language ideologies in the shared signing community of Adamorobe

This article analyzes language ideologies with regard to sign language in Adamorobe, a “shared signing community” in southern Ghana. Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL) is a “shared sign language,” used by all deaf people and a large number of hearing Akan-speaking people. Deaf schoolchildren from Adamorobe attend a school where Ghanaian Sign Language (GSL) is taught. Hearing interviewees have experiential knowledge that everything can be said in AdaSL, emphasise the shared roots of AdaSL and Akan, and called AdaSL “natural.” Deaf interlocutors describe Akan, AdaSL, and GSL as three distinct but equivalent languages. AdaSL is said to be a “hard” language, more pleasant to use, and more expressive than GSL, but sign bilingualism is highly valued. These findings are compared and contrasted with accounts on language ideologies with regard to other shared sign languages and larger urban/national sign languages. (Language ideologies, language practices, Ghana, Ghanaian Sign Language, Adamorobe Sign Language, Akan, shared sign languages, shared signing communities, village sign languages)*

Autogestion and competing hierarchies: deaf and other perspectives on diversity and the right to occupy space in the Mumbai surburban trains

Abstract This article offers a detailed ethnographic account of how people appropriate available space in compartments for disabled people in the Mumbai suburban trains, make it their own and monitor it, in the context of a succession of recent spatial changes. These compartments have increased in size over the years, and subsequently, the body of travellers has become more diverse. Passengers produce hierarchies based on need, physical differences, age differences and physical appearance, determining who can enter the compartments and who can’t, who can sit and who should stand, and where they should sit/stand. These hierarchies are mediated, but not dominated, by medical and disability certificates which are, in addition to a valid ticket, the documents that entitle people to travel in the handicapped compartments. Hierarchies are influenced by sexism, classism and audism and partially overlap but also are competing, such as in the case of deaf people who argue for the right to occupy seats and at the same time struggle with how to balance this quest with the need to act morally towards fellow travellers who seemingly suffer.

When transport becomes a destination: deaf spaces and networks on the Mumbai suburban trains

ABSTRACT This article considers dense social interactions in commuter trains and their crucial role within city-wide networks. Literature on social interactions in public transport has focused on how commuters have short interactions with each other, or constitute groups of train friends, but without situating them in wider geographies. The article focuses on deaf people in the Mumbai metropolis who travel in compartments reserved for disabled people, chatting and exchanging news and information. These spatial practices are facilitated by the peninsular geography and train infrastructure of Mumbai. In order to produce deaf spaces, where deaf sociality and sign language use are the organizing principles, deaf people strategically board particular trains and particular compartments, and sometimes remain in the train beyond their original destination. Mobile phones are used to coordinate these meetings. The diversity of people meeting in the train is high, such as with regard to gender, age, religion, caste, class and divisions are either perpetuated or abated. Because these compartments provide a diverse range of deaf people a space for daily meetings on the way to and from their (mostly hearing) work places and families; they are very important spaces to maintain and expand networks in the wider Mumbai deaf community.

Special Issue: Deaf and hearing signers’ multimodal and translingual practices

This special issue focuses on the study of the embodied visual-tactile modality (such as the use of sign languages and gestures) in translingual practices. “Translingual” refers to translanguaging, a term that has been coined to frame “the complex language practices of plurilingual individuals and communities” (Garcia and Wei 2014: 20). These language practices are not only plurilingual but also multimodal (Garcia and Wei 2014). However, multimodal approaches in translanguaging research have largely been interpreted and designed as focusing on written language and images in addition to spoken languages. Extending and transforming the study of multimodality in translanguaging, the articles in this special issue take deaf and hearing signers’ linguistic practices as their starting point, analysing the unique ways in which sign, gesture, writing, speaking and mouthing are used together to co-produce meaning. The articles in this special issue are based on presentations given during a symposium held on 20–21 June 2016 in Göttingen, made possible by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity. The symposium has led to the publication of another special issue that has been published in International Journal of Multilingualism (IJM) (2017, Volume 14, Issue 3, “Translanguaging and repertoires across signed and spoken languages: Insights from linguistic ethnographies in semiotically diverse contexts”). In that special issue, studies of translanguaging by signers and speakers are bridged through the notion of the semiotic repertoire. The semiotic repertoire departs from the idea that repertoires are merely linguistic (ie not only consisting of (features of) named spoken and signed languages, by also including the use of objects in interaction, drawing, gestures, body posture, smells, and so on (Kusters et al. 2017b). Kusters et al. (2017b) argue that the lens of the semiotic repertoire

Peasants, warriors and the streams: Language games and etiologies of deafness in Adamorobe, Ghana

Me: Were you born deaf? Kwame Osae: Yes, I was born deaf. Me: How come? You have hearing parents, right? [Being born deaf is usually linked to having deaf parents] Kwame Osae: (slightly confused) I don’t know . . . maybe because of witches. Me: Ama Korkor [Kwame’s younger deaf sister] told me that she was born hearing. Kwame Osae: That is not true, we were all born deaf: me, Kofi Pare, Ama Korkor, Yaa Bomo, and Yaa Aketewa [i.e., his four younger deaf siblings]