Cyborgs and Fox Wives (2025)

Cyborgs and Fox-wives: Interrogating local sign language ideologies in the Saskatchewan deaf community

2017

This chapter provides an arts based account of my journey in late acquisition of ASL in the context of diminished access to ASL role models and the use of ASL in an educational environment primarily mediated by signed English transliterators. Using an arts based posthumanist lens and support provided by Canagarajah (2013) and Garcia, Otheguy, & Reid (2015), this paper analyzes arts data (poetry) regarding events and decisions which took place over twenty year period of teaching deaf adolescents and adults with view to interrogating the evolution of sign language ideologies and the establishment of a translanguaging orientation within a small resource program where I currently teach deaf adolescents.

Anthropomorphism in Sign Languages: A Look at Poetry and Storytelling with a Focus on British Sign Language

Sign Language Studies, 2010

Sign language ideologies: practices and politics

Sign language ideologies in practice, 2020

While much research has taken place on language attitudes and ideologies regarding spoken languages, research that investigates sign language ideologies and names them as such is only just emerging. Actually, earlier work in Deaf Studies and sign language research uncovered the existence and power of language ideologies without explicitly using this term. However, it is only quite recently that scholars have begun to explicitly focus on sign language ideologies, conceptualized as such, as a field of study. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first edited volume to do so.

Sign Language: Vernacular Graphics and the Problem of Other Minds

I experience only my own conscious mental states directly; I cannot experience those of others in the same way. So do I have any reason to believe that others are conscious like me, or even if they have minds at all? What sort of minds might others have? An important way we answer these questions for ourselves is by the evidence of language (visual and linguistic systems of signs) which we presume provide access to others’ subjective states of mind. Our subjectivity is embodied, that is, we inhabit the world physically, interpreting and creating an image of our environment through our senses. Experience is therefore always constrained for us by the limits of our senses to perceive it. So languages are a limited answer to the problem of other minds, ultimately unreliable in successfully bridging subjectivities, one mind to another, one person to another, since signs are voices in the social domain, left behind when the speaker is gone, subject to change, distortion, corrosion and entropy. This thesis, consisting of an exegesis and an exhibition of paintings and photographs, is concerned with the limits of vernacular visual language. The aesthetic strategy is to explore that point where understanding edges toward a threshold where meaning might effectively cease; constructing metaphors for the inability of subjectivities to ever completely bridge the gap. In the Exegesis, I articulate the problem, some of its implications, and examine the relevant aspects of the work of several artists who in one way or another are intent on examining the problem and exploring its potential as an aesthetic strategy: Antoni Tápies, Cy Twombly, Aaron Siskind, Jasper Johns, and Rosalie Gascoigne.

Redesigning Literature: The Cinematic Poetics of American Sign Language Poetry

Sign Language Studies, 2003

The more the arts develop the more they depend on each other for definition. We will borrow from painting first and call it pattern. Later we will borrow from music and call it rhythm.

Deaftopia: Utopian Representations and Community Dreams by Sign Language Peoples. (book chapter - check the link)

Utopian Possibilities: Models, Theories, Critiques, 2023

Deaftopia conceptualizes utopian and dystopian manifestations of Sign Language Peoples, drawing from Deaf-led cultural productions. These cultural objects contain narratives and discourses that stem from diverse sources, including Deaf artwork and films, Deaf literature and visuature, Deaf-led activist demonstrations, and even political efforts for sign language recognition. Many perspectives are possible within Deaftopia. The utopian discourse enables us to get a glimpse of an improved societal scaffold, where sign language and Deaf culture thrives, while dystopian counter narratives and discourses of resistance forewarn us about the threats and dangers to Sign Language Peoples and their cultural legacy. This essay outlines findings from my doctoral research, with the aim not only to bring forth knowledge of Deaf culture, but also to contribute to its preservation. This is the role of Deaftopia for Sign Language Peoples.

Crom Saunders MLA Presentation Session 96- The De-Globalization of World Sign Languages

The De-­‐Globalization of World Sign Language English has long been acknowledged as the language of commerce, the language of education, and the language of the privileged, worldwide. This status comes out of a long history of colonization by the British Empire, which spilled over into American business, treaty, education, and expansion. One might even say the offspring republic has far exceeded the teachings of its parent country. This American language trend has neatly duplicated itself in a parallel version of language colonialism, language elitism, and language pervasion. American Sign Language (ASL) has held a position of high regard and recognition, in addition to legal protection and popular appeal, not only in America, but around the world as well. The groundbreaking American with Disabilities Act law set forth a complex machinery of language influence, due to the proliferation of ASL courses, ASL in popular media, the ASL-­‐English interpreting field, Deaf Studies programs,...

On the 1985 videopoem "Sign Language" by Tom Konyves

The Literariness of Media Art, 2018

As we approach 2019, I am reminded that it was in 1919 that the term “literariness” was introduced to the lexicon of literary criticism by Roman Jakobson of the St. Petersburg group of young radical thinkers who became known as the Russian Formalists. Now, “literariness” does not “roll off the tongue”; in fact, it’s unwieldy, redundant, even presumptuous but it has served its purpose – a one-word answer to the question, “What is literature and what is not?” – honourably for the past 100 years. Most significantly, it was quickly followed by “defamiliarization” or “ostranenie”, a term coined by Victor Shklovsky to describe the technique or device used to subvert our automatized, habitual responses in order to heighten perception, “to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known, to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and the length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.” I mention this because my writings on filmpoems and videopoetry owe much to the Formalists; “defamiliarization” is echoed in my Manifesto as “poetic juxtaposition… the ambiguous or enigmatic relationship of a particular image to a portion of text”. All to say that it was a particularly satisfying feeling to come across the new book published by Taylor and Francis, “The Literariness of Media Art”, which is now available free online! Delightful to play a part in this exploration of ‘the guises and effects of language as artistic material’! -- ABOUT THIS BOOK The beginning of the 20th century saw literary scholars from Russia positing a new definition for the nature of literature. Within the framework of Russian Formalism, the term ‘literariness’ was coined. The driving force behind this theoretical inquiry was the desire to identify literature—and art in general—as a way of revitalizing human perception, which had been numbed by the automatization of everyday life. The authors use literariness as a tool to analyze the aesthetics of spoken or written language within experimental film, video performance, moving image installations, and other media-based art forms, including my vision for "videopoems".

Signart: (British) sign language poetry as Gesamtkunstwerk

This completed doctoral thesis explores the phenomenon of poetry in British Sign Language. Whilst previous scholars have examined the form from literary and linguistic perspectives, no work has yet fully addressed the unique visual properties of sign languages as they are exploited creatively. The study situates current understandings of sign language poetry, tracing the influences of ocularcentrism and logocentrism on the discipline of deaf studies. 'Sign language poetry' is then re-contextualised through the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Derridean grammatology to emerge as 'Signart' - the performed and performative, visual and embodied art form of sign language communities. In addition to examining the theoretical frameworks through which academic, literary and artistic institutions might perceive and encounter it, Signart is explored through interviews with Signartists, their audiences and those who have not previously been exposed to Signart. A pilot translation of a Signartwork uncovers the significance of image in the form and leads to the adoption of a/r/tography as 'blurred' research method involving art practices, research and translation. A collection of visual artists is established to examine image in a core sample of four Signartworks, and further data is collected through two public events staged at the Royal West of England Academy. The results of these investigations suggest Signart as not only blended acts of literature and drawing (here called illumination), but also of gesture-dance, compositional rhythm, and cinematic properties which effect a social sculpture of deafhood within signing communities. The blend of artforms within Signart invites comparisons with the concerns of the modernist project; with ideas of synthesis, of synaesthesia and particularly of Gesamtkunstwerk. To illustrate the relevance of these concepts to an expanded understanding of Signart, the thesis draws on art epistemology and the ideas and works of a number of modernist and post-modernist artists - notably Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Joseph Beuys.

Arbitrariness and Iconicity: Historical Change in American Sign Language

Language, 1975

Grammarians since Saussure have insisted that language symbols are arbitrary, though conventionalized, in form. Sign languages in general, however, and American Sign Language (ASL) in particular, have been noted for their pantomimic or iconic nature. This paper examines some historical processes in ASL, and shows that there is a strong tendency for signs to change in the direction of arbitrariness, rather than maintaining a level of iconicity. Changes at the formational level can be seen as contributing to language-internal consistency, at the expense of transparency.* American Sign Language (ASL) is the natural language of the deaf community in the United States and English-speaking parts of Canada. It differs from languages that most linguists are familiar with because it is produced with the hands, rather than the vocal apparatus, and is perceived by the eyes rather than the ears. Yet, by every criterion other than production-perception modality, ASL fits our definitions of language (Fischer 1972). A few preliminary remarks seem appropriate, to orient the reader to sign language in general and ASL in particular, since several myths are widely held by otherwise well-informed people. The first is that sign language is universal. That this is false is easily shown: Deaf persons from China cannot understand ASL, nor can American deaf people understand Chinese signers. Moreover, ASL and modern French sign, which have a common origin in Old French Sign Language (OFSL), are today mutually unintelligible languages.1 (I will discuss some particulars of the history of OFSL and its descendants below.) And even more pointedly, sign language in Great Britain is genetically unrelated to and mutually unintelligible with ASL, despite the fact that the deaf of Britain and America share a common written language. It should be clear by now that we are speaking here only of sign languages used by deaf persons, as opposed to systems of signing within the Plains Indian community, or the hunting language of Australian aborigines. The particulars of such systems, supplementary to an oral-language tradition, will not be considered further here. A second myth, contradictory to the first, is that the sign language of a deaf community is somehow a manual representation of the oral language of the surrounding community; i.e. that ASL is a direct translation of English. The relation