Sadler Seminar Series - Signs beyond borders: Meaning-making across sign and spoken languages

Towards a transdisciplinary investigation of deaf-hearing interactions: Multimodality, Translanguaging and sign-language studies
Elisabetta Adami (LCS), James Simpson (S.of Education), Ruth Swanwick (S. of Education), and Christopher Stone (University of Wolverhampton)

This first seminar will discuss how we intend to integrate social semiotic multimodality, translanguaging and sign-language studies to develop a transdisciplinary approach for the understanding of daily life interaction of deaf and hearing people in multilingual and multicultural contexts.

During this first session we will explain the background to the series and the participants will briefly share their own perspectives and questions.
Participants are also invited to introduce their own research interests and how they chime with the issues raised and what expertise can be shared.

All welcome.

The Sadler Seminar Series Signs beyond borders: Meaning-making across sign and spoken languages examines the daily life interactions between deaf and hearing people to identify ways in which people with different visual / gestural and auditory / oral experience of language communicate and understand each other. The series will focus on daily life interactions between deaf and hearing people that present particular sensorial asymmetries. In particular it will ask:

• How do deaf and hearing people communicate when they share limited (sign and / or spoken) linguistic resources?
• What linguistic and other semiotic resources do they draw upon and what communicative strategies do they use?
• What can we learn from their practices about not only deaf / hearing interaction, but also all human communication and how we use available resources to make meaning?
• How can the understanding of these practices be used to empower (1) deaf / hearing participants in their daily life encounters, and (2) people who live, work and communicate in
multilingual / multicultural contexts?

The series will be the first in the UK to bring together deaf and hearing researchers of sign-language, multimodality, trans-languaging, and interpreting to develop new theoretical, trans-disciplinary approaches for the understanding of sign / spoken language communication.
We propose to shift the observational perspective onto sign / spoken language interaction. Instead of the traditional linguistic take, which looks at levels of proficiency in given ‘codes’ (either sign-language or speech), we will be looking at how deaf and hearing interactants use semiotic resources and communicative strategies to co-construct situated understanding beyond cultural and linguistic barriers, to fulfil their communicative needs in specific situations of daily life, in shops and streets, in families, at school, and in interpreter-mediated events.

This work will advance knowledge about sign/spoken language interaction in the first instance and, more broadly, about the multimodal nature of human communication. We envisage potential applications for education, interpreting and communication practices in deaf / hearing communities and multilingual / multicultural contexts more generally.