Annelies Kusters – författare

What does it mean to engage in Deaf Studies and who gets to define the field? What would a truly deaf-led Deaf Studies research program look like? What are the research practices of deaf scholars in Deaf Studies, and how do they relate to deaf research participants and communities? What innovations do deaf scholars deem necessary in the field of Deaf Studies? In Innovation in Deaf Studies: The Role of Deaf Scholars, volume editors Annelies Kusters, Maartje De Meulder, and Dai O'Brien and their contributing authors tackle these questions and more.Spurred by a gradual increase in the number of Deaf Studies scholars who are deaf, and by new theoretical trends in Deaf Studies, this book creates an important space for contributions from deaf researchers, to see what happens when they enter into the conversation. Innovation in Deaf Studies expertly foregrounds deaf ontologies (defined as "deaf ways of being") and how the experience of being deaf is central not only to deaf research participants' own ontologies, but also to the positionality and framework of the study as a whole. Further, this book demonstrates that the research and methodology built around those ontologies offer suggestions for new ways for the discipline to meet the challenges of the present, which includes productive and ongoing collaboration with hearing researchers.Providing fascinating perspective and insight, Kusters, De Meulder, O'Brien, and their contributors all focus on the underdeveloped strands within Deaf Studies, particularly on areas around deaf people's communities, ideologies, literature, religion, language practices, and political aspirations.

This book focuses on how sign language ideologies influence, manifest in, and are challenged by communicative practices. Sign languages are minority languages using the visual-gestural and tactile modalities, whose affordances are very different from those of spoken languages using the auditory-oral modality.

Shared signing communities consist of a relatively high number of hereditarily deaf people living together with hearing people in relative isolation, one being the Akan village in Ghana called Adamorobe. Annelies Kusters traveled to Adamorobe to conduct an ethnographic study of both the deaf and hearing populations in the village. She reveals how deaf people in Adamorobe did not live in a social paradise but that they created their own "Deaf Space" by seeking each other out to form a society of their own.

Highly topical work raising uncomfortable questions about power, inequality, inclusion, representation and linguistic justice in contemporary global deaf spacesInternational Sign (IS) is widely relied upon as a lingua franca of sign languages in international contexts, yet it remains one of the most debated and misunderstood forms of signed communication.Through extensive multinational ethnographic fieldwork, this book explores the paradox of IS: it often works best when it remains open and fluid, yet it becomes visible, teachable, interpretable and institutionally useful only through processes that seek to define it.Foregrounding deaf perspectives on language use, the book examines key dynamics of IS and traces how these are organised, evaluated and contested across informal and institutional settings. It includes visual vignettes, single-sign illustrations and links to ethnographic films created by the author allowing readers to engage with multimodal data in context and providing material for teaching and further research.This book will be of particular interest to researchers and students in sign linguistics, deaf studies, interpreting studies, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology as well as professionals working in deaf organisations, sign language interpreting, policy and media contexts.This book is open access under a CC BY NC ND licence.