TABLE: Toward a Better Linguistics Environment, a colloquium series taking place this fall, continues on Monday, November 8, with a presentation by Julie A. Hochgesang (Gallaudet), held via Zoom and in person in Dwinelle 370 (hybrid) from 3-4:30pm. Those who would like to attend, including Berkeley linguists, need to register for the event regardless of mode of attendance (Zoom registration; in-person registration). The presentation is entitled "Documenting the signed language use of the American Sign Language (ASL) communities as a Deaf linguist," and the abstract is as follows:
In this presentation I present my journey as a deaf linguist in North America and how experiences along the way have influenced my current theoretical preferences and practices in the work I do. These include having to push down feelings of rejection each time I read a generalist work on linguistics and finding no mention of signed language (especially when they are discussing “all human languages”); working on a dictionary project with Kenyan Sign Language users and considering how to make it theirs; thinking about how to textually represent a signed language that, like many others, have not been conventionally written down; and navigating how to document language use in today’s apocarevolutiondemic world in a project I’ve named from the ASL signs “document” “covid” - “O5S5”. Along the way, I muse on what it means to be inclusive and how tricky this is (e.g., for us “there’s no one way to be deaf”). And how important it is for our field and communities we work with to recognize and respect what should be a wide range of work reflecting what kind of lives are actually being lived and being meaningfully done by people living these lives.