1

Deaf Mobility Studies

Annelies Kusters

Deaf people meet deaf people from other countries in a wide range of contexts: visiting or hosting conferences, deaf sports events, and festivals; exploring a country as a tourist or guiding international tourists and visitors; migrating to a new country and interacting with local deaf people and/or with other migrants; relocating from a war-torn country to a refugee camp abroad and meeting other deaf refugees and deaf people from the host country. What unifies these deaf encounters is that they all happen in the context of international mobility. This book, which explores these encounters, is the result of Deaf Studies scholars venturing into Mobility Studies, an endeavor that I will call Deaf Mobility Studies. Both Deaf Studies and Mobility Studies are transdisciplinary fields in which a wide range of different theoretical and methodological approaches are drawn together around a common nexus: an interest in deaf lives and an interest in mobilities. In this book, the common foci of these two fields converge.

The research on which this book is based was undertaken as part of a 6.5-year project (2017–2023) funded by the European Research Council: Deaf Mobilities Across International Borders, shortened to MobileDeaf (mobiledeaf.org.uk). The project was undertaken by a team of five deaf researchers (four white, one brown; four women, one man) from three different countries; our positionality is discussed in depth in Chapter 2 and at various points throughout the book. Although affiliated with Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, the team conducted MobileDeaf fieldwork in sites across the world (outlined below); although most of this was concluded before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, some fieldwork was canceled or adapted in response to national and international lockdowns (see Chapter 2).

The MobileDeaf project considered deaf mobilities in a range of contexts: temporary and circular forms of mobility, short-term stays, and settlement over long periods of time. Within four subprojects, we focused on forms of professional, social, and personal mobility of diverse socioeconomic natures, which are differentially positioned on a continuum:

1.Forced migration (in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya)

2.Labor and marriage migration (in London)

3.Professional mobility; that is, people who travel for conferences, conventions, and courses, such as activists, academics, students, athletes, artists, and their audiences (in a range of countries)

4.Tourist mobility (in Bali, Indonesia)

The first and fourth subprojects represent two extremes: They contrast forced and voluntary movement, precariousness and affluence, and survival and leisure. In between these two oppositional forms are two more ambiguous, in-between forms of migration and mobility. These combine social and personal mobility, socioeconomic need, and professional upscaling, in contrast to forced migration in pursuit of refuge and tourism in pursuit of leisure. By bringing together data from our various field sites, the research team was able to identify common patterns as well as contrasts, which are brought together around four themes (see Figure 1.1): how deaf people seek spaces of belonging, engage in languaging, expand their networks, and experience immobility (see Chapters 7–10).

Figure 1.1. The four MobileDeaf subprojects and their interweaving themes.

In the next section, I explain what Mobility Studies is about, so as to link this field’s focus with the impetus for the MobileDeaf project: the scholarly interest in deaf cosmopolitanism within Deaf Studies. I then give background to the conceptual coffer that is employed in this book and our methodological approaches.

Mobility Studies as an Inspiration

The MobileDeaf project, although firmly grounded in Deaf Studies scholarship, is inspired by Mobility Studies. Mobility Studies emerged in the early 2000s, challenging “the ways in which much social science research has been ‘a-mobile’” (Sheller & Urry, 2006a, p. 208). It is a set of questions, theories, and methodologies in which mobility is positioned as central to the study of people, vehicles, things, and ideas. In these studies, “mobility” is an analytical category or a lens rather than an overarching descriptive term; it is “a certain way of seeing and ordering the world as well as social research” (Thimm & Chaudhuri, 2021, p. 277). Mobility Studies brings together the study of disparate forms of mobilities with different speeds, over different amounts of times, and over different distances—including migration, tourism, and everyday commutes. Because Mobility Studies involves a transdisciplinary focus on the study of these various forms of mobilities, it overlaps with fields such as Migration Studies and Tourism Studies (Sheller, 2021). Mobility Studies does not focus on movement only; it involves the study of how people “settle,” wait to be settled, and make new homes (Boccagni, 2022). In brief, Mobility Studies “involves analyzing networks, relations, and flows and circulation, and not fixed places. Yet it also analyzes processes of mooring, grounding, dwelling, waiting and homing” (Sheller, 2021, p. 10).

Mobility is, of course, inherently political and infused with power dynamics (Cresswell, 2010). Mobilities are uneven: Various individual privileges, wider infrastructures, and political-economic systems impact who can travel where, when, and how—that is, who is mobile, and who is not. The study of mobility and immobility cannot be separated (Hannam et al., 2006). For example, mobility over a large distance (e.g., transcontinental migration) can be followed by experiences of immobility. Immobility is also experienced when confronted with other people’s mobilities, such as by local guides facilitating the mobility of tourists, and it is brought into focus when attendees of international events are confronted by “who is not there” (Chapter 10). However, mobility and immobility are also “two dynamic sides of the same coin” (Salazar, 2021a, p. 3) because people often experience both mobility and immobility at the same time. People may feel immobile while having to stay in a refugee camp, for example, and being unable to move abroad, but they may be mobile within the camp and its immediate environment; other people may be internationally immobile but be hypermobile within the country in which they guide tourists (see Chapter 10).

The concept of motility has been used to indicate having the potential or capacity to be mobile (Høyer Leivestad, 2016). The previous examples indicate that motility does not correspond to mobility. People may be involved in a lot of movement or displacement (e.g., as refugees) but have low motility. Or, people may have a high degree of motility without actually being very mobile (e.g., people who spend their time locally, or even mostly at home, even though they have the means and ability to travel) (Sheller, 2021). Although immobility is often negatively valued and experienced as a restriction, it also can be a conscious choice or a privilege (Salazar, 2021a): not having to flee war or migrate to work abroad in underpaid jobs; being able to stay at home during the pandemic, whereas essential workers had to continue to be mobile in conditions that put their health at risk.

Mobility Studies is engaged with the larger political contexts of movement. As Toomey (2022) observes, “(im)mobilities are produced by settler colonialism, white supremacy and antiblackness” (p. 3), and ingrained patterns of motility inequality in today’s world are the result of imperialism and colonialism, the displacement of Indigenous populations, the slave trade, expulsions of large groups of people, and the migration of underpaid contract laborers. Indeed, because of this history, some people are positioned as “travelers” or “expats,” and others as “illegal” or “economic migrants” who are “deportable” or “disposable,” and these categories strongly intersect with race and ethnicity: “Black and nonwhite people’s mobility is highly constrained by racial hierarchies and infrastructures that prioritize white mobility” (Toomey, 2022, p. 7). As Sheller (2021) writes:

[T]he twenty-first century brought a growing splintering of mobility systems into hypermobile, friction-free, rich arrays of mobility choices for the kinetic elite who can afford to live in well-connected cities, versus the displacement, slow modes, and burdensome travel for the mobility-poor. (p. 49)

The mobility-poor are more heavily policed, their mobilities heavily regulated (e.g., through deportation, displacement, incarceration), and they are more likely to be subject to violence (Sheller, 2021).

Mobility Studies scholars juxtapose these different types of mobilities: those of the kinetic elite and of the mobility-poor; those of people who want to and can travel; and those of people who must travel but don’t want to, or who want to travel but cannot (Salazar, 2021a). The aim of studying different types of mobilities (e.g., urban commutes, tourism, migration) all together is to “[think] about mobilities as complex interconnected systems” (Sheller, 2021, p. 54). Consequently, some scholars have brought together different forms of mobility in taxonomies, according to types of mobility or the profiles of those who are mobile. An often-cited example is Bauman’s (1996) continuum between the emblematic figures of the “vagabond” and “tourist.” These different “key figures of mobility” (Salazar, 2017) are found in the same spaces under vastly different conditions. Various key figures of (international) mobility—such as “migrant,” “refugee,” “diplomat,” “businessperson,” “nongovernmental organization (NGO) worker,” “missionary,” “athlete,” “researcher,” and “journalist”—each represent “an (ideal-type) person but also a lived experience of a particular kind” (Salazar, 2017, p. 8).

Different “key figures” may have commonalities in how they are mobile and interact with people. For example, in her study of the 2001 World Deaf Games (now the Deaflympics) in Rome, Haualand (2002) identified a number of profiles of spectators: the tourists (who tended to stop at the event as part of a longer trip, e.g., “Interrailing” through Europe), the cosmopolitans (who were well traveled and knew several sign languages), and the supporters (who brought flags and wore national colors and supporter outfits). Studying how different key figures of mobility interacted in the same space, she discussed the “invisible border” (p. 28) between the athletes and the tourists, because they differed in the demands placed on them and their respective goals. She considered these key figures to be interacting within “two different worlds at the games, with the athletes and official delegates in one, and the spectators and tourist [sic] in the other” (p. 28). In the same vein, key figures, their experiences, and the types of mobilities they represent are studied together in Mobility Studies. People engaged in various types of international mobility are all subject to regulations at national borders, including the various types of visas needed for “working holidays,” students, tourists, partners of people who have already moved, and so on; these regulations make it very easy for some to enter a country and impossible for others (Sheller, 2021). Going back to the theme of taxonomies of mobilities, Toomey (2022) divides mobile subjects into three types:

the hyper mobile (those who are allowed, and encouraged to, travel for work or leisure), the compelled mobile (those compelled, by design of the global economy, to move for work) and the forced mobile (those who move for survival but often end up contained, incarcerated or detained). (p. 1)

Hypermobile subjects possess citizenship, and they travel without threat of deportation; by virtue of their mobility, “all hyper mobile subjects come to participate in inequitable structures of mobility,” including exploitation and exoticization (Toomey, 2022, p. 3). The tourism industry thrives on the labor of local people and on their dispossession when land is bought up for touristic purposes. Poverty is often itself seen as a tourist attraction, leaving colonial structures and racism in place; additionally, it is often assumed that tourists’ visits are helpful for the visited communities through their acts of consumption or in the form of “voluntourism” (engaging in volunteering while traveling). In contrast to hypermobile subjects, forced mobile subjects face violence, life-or-death circumstances, and threats to subsistence, and they often face dependency and forced idleness. Compelled mobile subjects are typically migrant workers who are “coerced away from their homes,” which are usually in “countries whose wealth has been drained by colonialism and the fiscal restructuring policies of Western financial institutions” (Toomey, 2022, p. 4), and the populations of which often rely on remittances. Compelled mobile subjects often do indispensable jobs that citizens do not want to do (e.g., farming, cleaning), for low pay. Many of these subjects have only temporary permission to work or are undocumented (Toomey, 2022).

Toomey’s distinction roughly corresponds with the spectrum the MobileDeaf team worked with, with hypermobility covered in the tourism and professional mobility subprojects and, to some extent, in the labor migration subproject (which also came to cover marriage migration). Compelled mobility was also covered within the labor migration project, and forced mobility in the subproject on forced migration. As mobile deaf researchers, we were hypermobile ourselves, and we studied the process of doing international research as a form of mobility in itself (see Chapter 2). Importantly, although focusing on people who do (or have done) international border crossing, the project also focuses on people on the receiving end of international mobility. Internationally mobile people meet “locals”; for example, people who have migrated interact with people born in the host country. Locals may have different responses toward refugees, migrants, tourists, and visiting professionals and may be of very different socioeconomic backgrounds than their visitors.

Just as “figures of mobility” (e.g., “migrant” or “refugee”) are essentialized constructs, the different categories of mobility are arbitrary to some extent. Mobilities can be temporary or permanent (legally, in terms of visa or residence permits; also in terms of personal decisions), but the boundaries between temporary and permanent migration are often blurred. For example, migration can happen in staggered ways, by living temporarily in a country (e.g., on a student visa) and then staying on, transitioning through visa categories (Robertson, 2019). Migration can be circular as well, with people moving through different countries or returning to a country in which they have lived before: “Movement and attachment is not linear or sequential but capable of rotating back and forth and changing direction over time” (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004, p. 1011). We capture examples of this in Chapter 9.

People can move between these categories of mobility in other ways as well. Formerly hypermobile people with high motility can be suddenly restricted in movement (e.g., due to the pandemic, in which “mobility has come under attack”; see Cresswell, 2021, p. 52), or they can be forced to move (e.g., due to a violent conflict); forced mobile people can become hypermobile at a different stage in their life (Toomey, 2022). Another example of links between different categories of mobility is a “local” marrying a “tourist” and then migrating to the tourist’s country of residence (Simoni, 2015). Breivik (2005) noted links between types of deaf hypermobility, such as someone who attended the Deaflympics as a spectator becoming interested in meeting deaf people from other countries and then deciding to go to a high school in the United States for an exchange year. Several examples of these links are covered in this book, such as professional mobility and tourism being combined, tourism leading to (marriage) migration or repeated voluntourism, and forced migration leading to resettlement.

Thus, identifying key figures of mobility (e.g., “migrants” or “tourists”), and separating different forms of mobility (e.g., migration or tourism), exaggerates the distinctions between them (Feldman, 2017). This is a problem of the “mobilities” framework, but it also confirms the necessity of the framework—that is, of studying forms of mobility together. However, others have pointed out that, notwithstanding the benefits of studying different types of mobility within one overarching field, there are pitfalls to joining the study of different types of mobility (e.g., migration, tourism) under “Mobility Studies.” Thimm and Chaudhuri (2021) argue that “adding migration just as another practice of mobility without any analytical explanations dilutes […] migration research with its differentiated aspects of analysis like the causes of movements, the decision-making processes involved, and the regulation of movement” (p. 276).

In an attempt to combine a mobilities framework with more specific foci, the MobileDeaf project researchers utilized an overarching Mobility Studies framing to bring together data from the four subprojects (Chapters 7–10), but they also retained a specific focus on each distinct type of mobility under examination (Chapters 3–6). (Note that there are many types of mobilities that are not covered in depth in our study, some of which have been covered elsewhere; these include development work, volunteerism, academic internships, and the work of nongovernmental organizations—see the edited volume It’s a Small World [Friedner & Kusters, 2015a] for examples.) Rather than studying all four types of mobilities in the United Kingdom alone, which undoubtedly would have led to more insights into the interrelations among them (as in the study by Simoni, 2015), we studied different types of mobility in vastly different research locations across the world.

The choice of specific locations for the subprojects (further explained in Chapter 2) was made with the aim of including participants from the Global North (subprojects 2, 3, and 4) and the Global South (all subprojects), in locations in both the Global North (subprojects 2 and 3) and the Global South (subprojects 1, 3, and 4), thus studying deaf Southerners’ experiences in the Global North and vice versa. By “the Global South,” I mean (typically postcolonial) countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America with access to fewer resources than countries in the Global North—that is, countries in Europe, along with Canada, the United States, Australia, and other nations with access to and control over resources. I acknowledge that this distinction between Global North and South is overly general and sweeping, and it is problematic for “Global North” countries located in the Southern hemisphere, but for this project I also found it a useful one for studying the vast inequalities outlined by the authors in It’s a Small World (Friedner & Kusters, 2015a) and by Hou and Ali (2024).

Deaf Studies Interrogating Deaf Cosmopolitanism

This book’s primary focus is on international mobility. Mobility Studies’ reach is broader, in that it also includes local mobilities, such as movement within cities or migration within national borders. In this book, the MobileDeaf team does focus on local and national mobility but always within the broader context of international deaf mobility (see the section on translocality). In terms of border regulations, people often have “free mobility” within nations but not between them, which means that focusing on international mobility is fundamentally different from focusing on national mobility. The MobileDeaf focus on international mobility was motivated by an interest by Deaf Studies scholars in what we have called “deaf cosmopolitanism.”

In a genealogy of cosmopolitanism as it relates to mobility, Acharya (2016) begins with its origins in the Greek word kosmopolitês, a “citizen of the world” or “world citizen(ship)” (p. 33). Cosmopolitanism can be seen as a worldview or philosophy, a political project, an attitude or orientation, or a condition (Vertovec & Cohen, 2002, p. 4). Of the various uses and implications of the cosmopolitanism concept, Glick Schiller et al. (2011) direct attention to sociability, “in which a shared sense of common sensibilities does not override but coexists with ongoing diversity of perspective and practice” (p. 401). Cosmopolitan sociability consists of forms of competence and communication skills that are based on the human capacity to create social relations of inclusiveness and openness to the world (Nowicka & Rovisco, 2009).

The idea that there exists a “deaf cosmopolitanism” has circulated in various forms for centuries. Although the term itself has not always been used, the notion has appeared in European and American deaf magazines and literature since at least the late 18th century. For example, deaf Frenchman Pierre Desloges wrote in 1789 about international deaf networks in Paris that existed before the first public deaf school was established. Murray’s (2007) dissertation on deaf transnationalism starts by quoting Amos Draper, a deaf American traveling with a group of approximately 20 Americans (likely to be predominantly—or exclusively—white men; see below) to the 1889 International Congress of the Deaf in Paris, describing the arrival of their steamship in Liverpool. Draper quotes Shakespeare in his narrative:

When our ship reached Liverpool this morning and from her deck were seen several of your number conversing in the crowd that stood upon those wonderful docks, it recalled that line of your greatest poet which says “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin;” for though you dwell here upon an island and we upon a continent beyond the seas, yet in all essentials our experiences are probably the same. If you have troubles we can sympathize with you, for we have the same troubles; or if you have joys, those joys are ours, and we rejoice with you. (In Murray, 2007, p. iii)

Deaf cosmopolitanism is an attitude, orientation, and process that is embodied by deaf people who connect across national and linguistic borders (Moriarty & Kusters, 2021). The concept of deaf cosmopolitanism implies that because of these connections, deaf people are “world citizens”; indeed, the attendance of deaf people from Japan, Ecuador, the United States, Russia, and Mexico at the Paris World Fair in 1900 prompted a French deaf leader to say, “United as a community … we know no borders” (Congress, 1900, p. 258; as cited by Gulliver, 2015, p. 4). The ideology of deaf cosmopolitanism is undergirded by the assumption that deaf people have the same “joys” and “troubles” based on their shared deafness, even when they travel to the other side of the world. Deaf people, and Deaf Studies scholars, have argued that the “joys” of connecting internationally are motivated and facilitated by the shared experience of being deaf, and by the visuogestural linguistic skills that signing deaf people possess (e.g., Bauman & Murray, 2014; Ladd, 2015). Furthermore, the shared “troubles” are usually related to the majority society consisting of hearing and speaking people (Murray, 2007).

Deaf Studies authors studying deaf international encounters have often used the concept of transnationalism to describe the above, rather than cosmopolitanism (Haualand et al., 2016; Murray, 2007). The scholarship on transnationalism has focused on global interconnectedness, social networks, political links, and economic exchanges between people who are physically located in different nations. Initially, the transnationalism concept was used most often in the context of research on migrant diasporas (Vertovec, 2013), although it has also been used to talk about, for example, the transnational aspects of gay/queer identities (Boellstorff, 2005)—and, indeed, deaf identities. Yet transnationalism is “a necessary but insufficient condition for the growth of a successful cosmopolitanism” (Vertovec & Cohen, 2002, p. 20). Transnationalism “does not refer to qualitative feelings or attitudes of individuals, and it is not affected by what people think of it” (Roudometof, 2005, p. 118). Cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, explicitly involves affect, feelings, attitudes, and dispositions.

In Deaf Studies works where “transnationalism” has been used as a framework (e.g., Breivik, 2005; Murray, 2007), the authors have often discussed cosmopolitan practices without naming them as such. These authors adopted a view on cosmopolitanism supporting the notion that it “rests between universalisms and diversity constructed in mobile encounters between people” (Acharya, 2016, p. 43). This is the approach to cosmopolitanism advocated by Glick Schiller et al. (2011): Cosmopolitanism arises from “social relationships that do not negate cultural, religious or gendered differences but see people as capable of relationships of experiential commonalities despite differences […] [moving] beyond the binaries of inclusion vs. exclusion, sameness vs. difference” (p. 403, my emphasis). As Moriarty and Kusters (2021) argue, “using ‘deaf cosmopolitanism’ as a concept emphasizes these moral orientations in ways that many scholars discussing deaf transnational connections, deaf universalism or deaf internationalism have done but not centralized in their analysis” (p. 9).

Scholars have made efforts to broaden cosmopolitanism beyond its Eurocentric values, applications, and claims to universalism (Vertovec & Cohen, 2002), moving away from its association with mobility and privilege (Amit, 2015; Hannerz, 2004). For example, people who do not travel outside the country where they were born can and do engage in cosmopolitan relationships, such as tour guides in tourist destinations (Salazar, 2015) and shop owners working in superdiverse neighborhoods (Wessendorf, 2014). Additionally, authors have criticized claims that cosmopolitanism can be gender neutral, racially neutral, or ethnically neutral (Glick Schiller et al., 2011, p. 404). The previously mentioned notion of sharing joy and trouble is, at root, a white, male, middle-to-upper class conception of being deaf and hypermobile—that is, with high motility (although white deaf men did face barriers at national borders in the 19th century; see Baynton, 2006). Amos Draper and his companions could access financial resources that enabled them to travel and to participate in transnational encounters—that is, to become “citizens of the world.” To be sure, less well-represented groups, such as lower-class deaf people, Asian deaf people, black deaf people, and deaf women, were also internationally mobile through trade and art networks and as contract workers, teachers, employees, wives, and entrepreneurs—and, indeed, through violations of human rights such as enslavement and other forms of forced migration (Cleall, 2015; Mirzoeff, 1995; Murray, 2007). However, their connections, actions, experiences, and discourses are far less well documented, and they are less visible in historical literature on international deaf encounters.

Language is central to historical notions of deaf cosmopolitanism, and it has been foregrounded in celebrations of it. White deaf men in 18th- and 19th-century Paris convened at annual banquets with international scope (Gulliver, 2015; Murray, 2007), at which:

Deaf mute foreigners, in their toasts, never missed a chance to emphasise the universal nature of signs, claiming that “it easily wins out over all the separate limiting languages of speaking humanity […]. Our language encompasses all nations, the entire globe.” (Mottez, 1993, p. 36)

As Moriarty and Kusters (2021) note, “this quote includes ideologies about deaf cosmopolitanism as well as language ideologies in relation to deaf cosmopolitanism” (p. 7). Deaf cosmopolitanism is grounded in early conceptions about the nature of sign language, which was seen (at the time) as being one sign language with multiple variants rather than as multiple sign languages.

Deaf people who engage in mobility may use and learn multiple languages, including local or national sign languages and spoken/written languages, and may make use of signed lingua franca, such as International Sign (IS) and American Sign Language (ASL). IS emerges when signers of different linguistic backgrounds come together; it typically incorporates signs from national sign languages (including ASL), and it often includes mouthings from English and other spoken languages. Its use is variable and dependent on the geographical, political, social, cultural, and linguistic contexts in which it occurs, and the backgrounds of the people who use it. There are conventionalized and less-conventionalized uses of IS (Rathmann & De Quadros, 2022; Zeshan, 2015), and they are typically used together in the same communicative contexts (e.g., at deaf international events). Traditionally, being able to use and understand the more conventional versions of IS was correlated to mobility, privilege, and the ability to make use of certain semiotic resources, including a range of literacies (Green, 2014, 2015). Today, an increasing number of people, of an increasing variety of backgrounds, learn IS online via YouTube and social media. Another sign language (or elements of it) that is very frequently used in international deaf spaces as a lingua franca is ASL, which has spread over the world in different contexts, such as through missionary work, development work, and higher education (Kusters, 2021). Instead of, or in addition to, using signed lingua franca, mobile deaf signers also may learn (the basics of) host country sign languages in a short time span (see Chapter 8 for examples).

In Chapter 8, the concept of calibration is used to show how linguistic differences are negotiated by deaf people who engage in language practices in ways that they think fit their interlocutors. They select features and strategies from “different languages” to communicate effectively, for example, by adapting their signing by slowing down; using pantomime; paraphrasing concepts; switching languages; or using signs, words, and fingerspelled alphabets associated with different languages (Byun et al., 2017). The MobileDeaf researchers were calibrating in communication throughout gathering the data for this book (see Chapter 2).

It remains an oft-repeated and essentializing refrain among deaf people that being deaf signers is the basis of an innate connection with deaf signers from other countries, and that this forms the motivation for travel (Breivik et al., 2002; Kusters & Friedner, 2015) and for being “citizens of the world.” In some of the Deaf Studies literature, international connections between deaf people, and skills in international communication, have been described and celebrated as central to deaf identities, especially in the face of audist discourses and practices in which deaf signers are oppressed. It is even the case that, as Kusters and Friedner (2015) note, “in a number of deaf studies concepts, the international dimension of deaf experiences, networks, and signed languages has been explicitly included” (p. xvii), with definitions or examples of Deaf Gain and Deafhood often including the “special” or “typical deaf” ability to cross international borders (Bauman & Murray, 2014; Ladd, 2003, 2015). The consistency of these discourses in Deaf Studies theories has probably served as an extension and confirmation of the previously mentioned essentializing historical discourses, which have been passed on and amplified through the years, as well as experienced anew and repeatedly. Notably, works on deaf transnationalism have tended to emphasize—even exaggerate—“sameness” and connection between deaf people of different races, nationalities, cultures, ethnicities, religions, and languages, often uncritically (Kusters & Friedner, 2015).

Key to these overly emphasized notions of deaf cosmopolitanism in particular, and deaf mobility in general, is the fact that deaf people are scattered across wider society, are mostly born into hearing families, and most often tend to gather with other deaf people in spaces outside of the home. It is due to this experience of being scattered that national and international connectedness (in deaf schools, deaf clubs, deaf associations, and events—see Chapter 7) is so important, and it is so frequently (and often exclusively) described as being thoroughly enjoyable (Breivik, 2005). Deaf people’s mobility is often made easier by free or discounted passes for travel within cities and nations (Chapter 4) and/or by government benefits (Chapter 6), which further make it possible for scattered people to connect and thrive. Dispersal, however, also means that many deaf people miss out on an education and a complex social life because they may go to a school that is solely tailored to hearing students (and they may potentially be the only deaf student there) or not have the opportunity to go to school at all; they also often miss out on participation in wider deaf networks.

Deaf cosmopolitanism on a global level, both in practice and in discourse, is thus somewhat the antithesis of the image of the immobile, lonely, locally stuck, isolated, language-deprived, and socially disconnected deaf person. This is an image that is also central to many deaf advocacy efforts, which may entail the connected deaf person “finding” and “helping” the lonely, disconnected (and possibly uneducated) deaf person “with no language” (Moriarty Harrelson, 2017c), typically in far-flung villages in the Global South, and “connecting them” by sending them to school or otherwise educating them, often in the context of missionary work or educational outreach (see Chapter 7). International mobility for deaf people, especially to places with a strong deaf presence and history, such as Gallaudet University, is often associated with empowerment, thriving, and flourishing (De Clerck, 2007), even when people on the receiving end of “empowerment” efforts may not be explicitly interested in meeting (or being “saved” by) foreign deaf people (Lee, 2012). The “scatteredness” is also contrasted with chance encounters with deaf people abroad. Many deaf people have stories about memorable times that they accidentally met (or were approached by) deaf people abroad, with some becoming their tour guides or entry points into local deaf networks (see Breivik, 2005, pp. 133, 173; see also Chapters 4 and 7).

Deaf international professional mobility, such as travel to conferences and sports events and for development and missionary work, has been better documented by researchers than other forms of deaf international mobility; the previously mentioned ideologies on transnationalism and cosmopolitanism thus mostly emerge from studies on professional mobility (mostly of white deaf people). One reason (both historical and contemporary) that these mobilities have been particularly studied is that they have been documented irrespective of researchers’ interests, for example in magazines and reports, and also in a range of (self-)published books by (mostly white) authors who have documented (or criticized) the work of international deaf organizations, such as the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) and the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf (Gannon, 2011; Harrison, 2014; Mesch & Mesch, 2018). In contrast, other forms of international mobility, such as forced migration and tourism, are much more individual, less documented, and often less privileged, so although researchers have been aware of such mobilities, they have been much more difficult to study.

The scholarship on forms of professional and tourist mobility was broadened in the book It’s a Small World, in which the various authors were asked to critically engage with the universalizing DEAF-SAME concept (Friedner & Kusters, 2015). Reminiscent of Draper’s quote cited in Murray (2007), “yet in all essentials our experiences are probably the same,” DEAF-SAME implies that deep down, deaf people around the world are essentially the same; it is a belief in a “deep connection that is felt between deaf people around the globe, grounded in experiential ways of being in the world,” and in deaf international communication (Kusters & Friedner, 2015, p. x). In the book, a wide range of different types of international mobilities in settings all over the world were covered, but it only focused on short-term mobilities, such as tourism, youth camps, courses, conferences, development work, and research trips, as well as on digital mobilities. The authors explored the aspirations and expectations of deaf people when reaching out to deaf people in other countries; motivations included the desire to make new friends, to have an “authentic” tourist experience, to guide tourists, to practice religion together, to profit financially, and to engage in study, research, development, or charitable works. They found that international deaf encounters are not only manifestations of (the discourse of) deaf universalism, but they are also often experienced as fraught, uneven, and ambivalent, thus challenging the notion of DEAF-SAME.

The MobileDeaf project broadens and deepens the study of deaf cosmopolitanism by not only taking a deep look at types of short-term mobility but also considering them alongside forms of migration. Our work complements the number of studies on deaf migration and deaf refugees that have proliferated in the past few years; see Chapters 3 and 4 for references. A key difference between these works and our study is that we study migration in connection with other types of international mobility. Earlier studies on deaf cosmopolitanism started from the observation that deaf people travel with the aim of connecting with other deaf people. In contrast, not all deaf people in the MobileDeaf study are internationally mobile with the primary aim of meeting deaf people in other countries or engaging in activities that involve deaf people from other countries. For example, some have moved to a new country to flee war or to join a new spouse, or some are in search of education and employment opportunities. In these contexts, they have worked to expand their networks with deaf people and they have explored various spaces where they could belong, including spaces in which they were the only deaf person among hearing people (Chapters 7 and 9).

The aim of this book is not to validate deaf cosmopolitanism. Rather, the discourse of deaf cosmopolitanism is taken as a starting point to critically interrogate whether and how it manifests in various field sites, over a spectrum of mobilities, and in a range of practices, including languaging. Appiah (2006) has argued that cosmopolitanism consists of two strands of values: “universal concern” for others, which is more ideological, and “respect for legitimate difference” between particular individuals, which is more practical (p. xv). In this context, he has said that “cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge,” asking, “A citizen of the world: how far can we take that idea?” (Appiah, 2006, p. xv). Cosmopolitanism is thus a challenge in relationships between specific human beings with specific backgrounds and specific beliefs, and who engage in specific practices. The MobileDeaf team critically interrogated the notion of deaf cosmopolitanism by exploring a spectrum of (im)mobilities, and not only privileged mobility.

Interrogating deaf cosmopolitanism, the MobileDeaf team here analyzes the enormous potential of—as well as the severe constraints to—the social and geographical international mobility of deaf signers. We show how these affordances and constraints have an impact both on the ability to travel physically and on participation within international deaf spaces. Within these spaces, we analyze experiences of connection and disconnection between deaf people of different (multi-)national backgrounds. On the one hand, international deaf encounters can indeed be manifestations of (a discourse of) deaf cosmopolitanism, where differences are put aside (or consumed) in favor of forming a connection based on being deaf. We have found examples of this, particularly in relation to language practices (Moriarty & Kusters, 2021; Chapter 8). On the other hand, discourses and practices that overly emphasize deaf cosmopolitanism risk sidelining differences, at the cost of downplaying racism, sexism, and ableism, meaning that deaf international encounters are made to conform to idealized “templates.” We have found examples of how, in Canagarajah’s (2021a) words, “racial segregation and nationalist exceptionalism rather than transnational cosmopolitanism are getting strengthened” (p. 570). Adopting an intersectional lens, we ask to what extent deaf cosmopolitanism is a Global North, white, hypermobile deaf signers’ construct, and to what extent it resonates with deaf signers from a wider variety of backgrounds who are mobile in a wider range of contexts, for a wider range of reasons; additionally, we include the study of the ways in which deaf people in the host countries interact with deaf visitors. For this study to break away from perpetuated notions within Deaf Studies, we had to engage with a range of theories and concepts originating in other disciplines; these are outlined in the next section.

A Conceptual Coffer for Deaf Mobility Studies

Mobility Studies is by nature transdisciplinary, bringing together:

some of the more purely “social” concerns of sociology (inequality, power, hierarchies) with the “spatial” concerns of geography (territory, borders, scale) and the “cultural” concerns of anthropology or communication research (discourses, representations, schemas), while inflecting each with a relational ontology of the co-constitution of subjects, spaces, and meanings. (Sheller, 2021, p. 12)

The necessity of engaging with social, spatial, and cultural concerns means that the MobileDeaf team needed concepts that could bring different fields together in a transdisciplinary approach. Because the work done by the team is grounded within Deaf Studies, we have worked with concepts that were already used within this field, such as “deaf space.” However, we also looked “outward.” The five of us have a combined training in philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology, geography, and international development, and we read widely across those areas while also exploring literature in relation to the specific types of mobilities each of us took as our focus. In addition, we familiarized ourselves with literature that we thought would be useful for developing a conceptual framework to be shared between us, such as texts on cosmopolitanism, translanguaging, transnationalism, translocality, and intersectionality. It is by way of regular meetings and reading groups (see Chapter 2) that we ultimately arrived at a shared “conceptual coffer.”

Over the years of this project, there were several “keywords of mobility” (see Salazar, 2016) that came up repeatedly and to which we came to tie our data analysis. In the edited book Keywords of Mobility (Salazar & Jayaram, 2016), the authors each explored a keyword for thinking about mobility, such as “cosmopolitanism,” “motility,” “immobility,” “capital”—all “big” concepts with broad meanings that shift as they accumulate over time, and shift in relation to each other. Many of the keywords that emerged within our study overlap with these keywords of mobility. Where a keyword is used to frame a single chapter in this book (“networks” in Chapter 7, “calibration” in Chapter 8, “belonging” in Chapter 9, and “immobility” in Chapter 10), they will be introduced in the respective chapter. There are, however, several keywords that are used in multiple chapters, whether as a framing device or even to structure the chapter; these are introduced in the next section.

Deaf Space

The concept of deaf space has been used a lot in Deaf Studies, mainly since the early 21st century. “Deaf geographies” literature has approached deaf spaces as embodied, visucentric, physical, or virtual spaces produced by deaf signers, directing a focus to the spatial forms and material environments of deaf gatherings (Gulliver & Fekete, 2017; Gulliver & Kitzel, 2016). Deaf space has also been used as an architectural concept describing the (re)design of buildings to suit deaf people (Bauman, 2014). In the deaf geographies tradition, however, deaf space has often been used to refer to social gatherings of signing deaf people (although O’Brien [2021a] has convincingly argued that a single deaf person also produces deaf space).

Institutional deaf spaces (which are called “place-nodes” in Chapter 7) include clubs, courses, organizations, and events, and these have traditionally been a focus of Deaf Studies (e.g., Van Cleve & Crouch, 1989). Some places have become nodes of different types of international mobilities: Documented examples include Adamorobe (Kusters, 2015), a village in Ghana with a high rate of hereditary deafness that has been frequented by deaf and hearing tourists, researchers, priests, NGOs, and so on. Gallaudet University is another such node of different types of mobilities, attracting students, researchers, tourists, and those on a journey of self-discovery.

Different from institutional deaf spaces are those that are produced in public and semipublic spaces, “rooms without walls” (Vertovec, 2015) that emerge in places such as parks, pubs, or restaurants or on public transport. These types of deaf spaces have been studied by O’Brien (2005) and myself (Kusters, 2017a, 2017b), among others who have demonstrated that these spaces operate under “deaf rules” yet can also “clash” with (people in) the wider surrounding space. Deaf spaces can also be produced in or around private homes, which become hubs for deaf people to meet each other (Heap, 2006; Kusters, 2015; see Chapter 3). Growing numbers of studies focus on virtual deaf spaces that are produced through the internet, which have allowed greater involvement and feelings of belonging in communities of shared interest and have permitted the sharing of information and resources across national borders (Ilkbasaran, 2015; Kurz & Cuculick, 2015).

Deaf spaces can operate as spaces of kinship, self-realization, and empowerment for deaf signers but also as places where deaf people are made to feel unwelcome, excluded, or challenged. One such example is deaf women in India in male-dominant deaf spaces, such as public transport (Kusters, 2019). In line with most previous studies on deaf space, the MobileDeaf team uses it as a descriptive concept rather than an analytical one. In Chapter 9, deaf belonging and lack of belonging are studied across different spaces, including experiences of belonging between or among queer deaf people, Indian deaf people, deafblind people, Czech hearing gay people, and deaf Muslims.

Scale

Deaf spaces are produced in relation to each other in networks, and these networks are layered in scale, such as local–national–regional–global (see Chapters 5 and 7). The deaf mobilities covered in this book range from local mobility to international mobility. Scale is also a central organizing mechanism for languages. Take, for example, the names of sign languages: Adamorobe Sign Language (a village sign language in Ghana), British Sign Language (a national sign language), and International Sign (an international lingua franca). Scale is also embedded in the name and/or the mission of many deaf organizations, such as the WFD or the Bali Deaf Community.

Scale has been one of the foundational concepts in geography, but it has also been engaged in depth within other disciplines, such as anthropology (Summerson Carr & Lempert, 2016). However, there are multiple problems with using scale as a key concept. Scale is “unwieldy” with a lot of conceptual baggage (Moore, 2008, p. 203) and is often conceptualized in static ways, similar to the way in which concepts such as identity (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000) and culture (Brumann, 1999) are used. Consequently, some authors have argued against the use of scale as a central concept in research.

Others, however, have urged against throwing out the baby (scale as a concept) with the bathwater (problematic uses of the concept). When using the concept, scales (e.g., local, village, national, international) should not be treated as fixed, as a priori givens, or as grounded in nature, in law, or in the divine. There is a need to study “scalar dimensions of practices, rather than practices occurring at different scales” (Mansfield, 2005, p. 468, emphasis in original). In other words, scale needs to be adopted as a category of practice rather than a category of analysis. The problem with treating scale as a category of analysis is that it reifies spaces as entities and treats scales (e.g., local, national) as objectively existing, preordained, hierarchical levels or platforms. However, “it is not necessary to retain a commitment to the existence of scales in order to analyze the politics of scale” (Moore, 2008, p. 213). Instead, scholars should study scaling as a political and ideological practice and process. The MobileDeaf team has found “scale” and “scaling” useful concepts to distinguish between types of (local, national, international) networks (Chapter 7), to theorize how these scales are constructed or produced (see Chapter 5 on the “national” scale and Chapter 6 on the “global deaf circuit”), and to theorize the reach of mobilities (Chapter 10). However, we acknowledge that we do at times write about scales as though they were fixed in place, as a necessary shorthand when exploring the nuances of scaling practices.

Translocality

Translocality is a term used to signify connections between different spaces across scales and within scales. This concept is useful because “[m]obility studies call attention to the myriad ways in which people become part, in highly unequal ways, of multiple translocal networks and linkages” (Salazar, 2016, p. 2). Translocality as a concept emerged in response to scholarship on transnationalism. Scholars who have used transnationalism as a framework have usefully highlighted some aspects of deaf international connections; the same is true of cosmopolitanism. In this book, the complementary use of the translocality concept highlights aspects of deaf international encounters that have been under-researched thus far. A problem with the scholarship on transnationalism (or cosmopolitanism) is that it has treated processes as dislocated, as not grounded or situated in particular places. In contrast, translocality is about “mobility and emplacement as simultaneous processes” (Porst & Sakdapolrak, 2017, p. 114); see Figure 1.2 for an illustration.

Figure 1.2. A fictional set of countries, showing local networks; translocal connections between the network clusters and between different places; the national scale; and the international scale.

Researchers working with a translocality framework have looked at local-to-local relations and have studied “situatedness during mobility” (Brickell & Datta, 2011, p. 3) in relation to specific places that are meeting points and reference points. Translocality is about these “[p]laces where mobility is actually grounded, where mobile actors meet, where connections converge, and towards which flows of resources are directed or from which they depart” (Porst & Sakdapolrak, 2017, p. 113). Translocal practices are multi-scalar (Brickell & Datta, 2011). Different scale-making processes (e.g., networks in specific neighborhoods, as well as global networks) are relevant to practices of mobility in and to these places. In places, distinctions between scales are blurred (Porst & Sakdapolrak, 2017). Places in our examples include a village in Bali, a house in Kakuma Refugee Camp, a pub in London, and a campus in Denmark. The translocality framework also implies a focus on connections between different places, including local–local connections and migration within the same country on different scales; for example, interregional, interurban, and intraurban. These local–local connections refer to the movement of people but also of ideas, of things, of money, and so on. Internal mobility (movement within national boundaries) often falls outside of the scope of studies of transnationalism and migration, but as mentioned previously, it forms part of the scope of Mobility Studies and of this book. For example, the local mobilities and networks (within a neighborhood, city, or country) of tour guides, deaf refugees, and deaf migrants are considered.

Local–local mobilities are highly relevant to the study of international mobilities: When international deaf events happen, for example, host locations are not merely containers for the events, but are transformed by them. Local “deaf places” (e.g., deaf clubs or deaf-owned businesses) are often visited by attendees of the event, members of local deaf communities are often involved in the event’s organization, and the surrounding area often becomes “deafened” by the critical mass of deaf attendees (see Chapter 7). Additionally, by virtue of large events having happened there, such places are then put on deaf mental maps and included in ever more complex networks (see Chapter 7), and through this are shaped and/or transformed further, such as by the socioeconomic impact of an influx of deaf tourists (see Moriarty, 2020a). In Chapter 6, the notion of a translocal “global deaf circuit” is introduced, to flag how certain “deaf places”—such as schools, clubs, pubs, cafes, and “deaf villages”—are part of a deaf mental map that guides tourists. We join translocality scholars in drawing attention to this field of interconnected spaces across scales (Porst & Sakdapolrak, 2017).

Comparisons

“Comparisons” is not a keyword that I have often encountered in the Mobility Studies literature; however, the MobileDeaf team identified it as a key activity in international deaf mobility. We noted that deaf people who engage in international encounters seem to be very invested in making comparisons across scales, especially between nations (see Chapter 5): comparing problems and barriers encountered in relation to deaf educational policies, and the strategies to challenge them (Murray, 2007); comparing specific deaf landscapes (e.g., of schools and organizations) across countries (Friedner & Kusters, 2014); comparing legislation in relation to sign languages (De Meulder, 2015); comparing how deaf people in other countries live (this book); comparing the signs used in different sign languages (see Chapter 8); comparing how deaf people communicate with hearing people in various societies, and so on.

Comparing is scaling. In drawing comparisons, the facts, experiences, or stories that “do not fit” are frequently ignored, dismissed, or erased in favor of a few similarities that are identified as salient. Instances of similarity are taken as tokens of the same “type,” and the produced ideological relation between types and tokens can be seen as a shift in scale, with “type” being of greater scale (Gal, 2016, p. 94). An example of this is the generalized notion of “sign language recognition,” a term that is used in ways that sideline national differences between legislations (De Meulder, 2015). As mentioned already, the comparisons and generalizations produced in transnational encounters are very often made on the national level, such as the generalization of people from the Indian subcontinent as “Indians,” and then comparing “India” and “Indians” with “the United Kingdom” and “British people” (see Chapter 9). Another example of national scaling involves rendering different nations commensurable: In international events, nations may be rendered “comparable” irrespective of their size or other characteristics, even if the activity of comparing identifies differences (Chapter 5).

In this context of rendering oneself, one’s experiences, and one’s nation as comparable in the deaf transnational sphere, deaf people may behave more deaf. Paradoxically, participating in “deafened spaces” (i.e., where the majority of participants are deaf) has led some deaf people to say that they feel “hearing” abroad because they no longer stand out (see Breivik, 2005, p. 169). Some deaf people have also had experiences in their home country of being seen as “oral,” “deafened,” “not from a deaf family,” or “hard of hearing”; in contrast, they have been welcomed as “deaf” when abroad (see Stein, 2015). Again, the (more) “deaf way” in which people behave or feel is very specific. Haualand et al. (2015) noted that particular discourses on “the right way to be deaf” were circulating during the deaf mega-events they studied around the turn of the 21st century, including the WFD congresses and the Deaflympics. They observed that:

The anticipated “right” way to be deaf is to take pride in and accept being deaf, use sign language, refrain from using hearing aids and/or cochlear implants at least during a deaf event and spend time on deaf culture and deaf politics. (p. 53)

“The right way to be deaf” differs among times and spaces. Taking a historical example, Murray (2007, p. 83) wrote that at the 1893 Chicago congress, deaf signers would interpret each other’s signed presentations into spoken languages for the benefit of hearing people in the audience. Nowadays, however, a sharp distinction is drawn between speaking and signing: Although (increasing numbers of) deaf people may speak in their private lives, they are typically discouraged from doing so in deaf transnational spaces, where it is hearing interpreters who do the speaking if a voiceover is required. Signing, then, can be crucial to “the right way to be deaf,” but which sign language or signed lingua franca is “right” can vary. For example, in Chapter 8, we show that ASL is seen as a good way to communicate internationally in some cases but is rejected in others.

As part of the process of comparing deaf lives, certain ways of being deaf are foregrounded over others, certain practices are seen as more appropriate than others, and the people who have relatively more power are able to institutionalize those expectations. In this context of comparing, differences of nationality and race (for example) are flagged but are also rendered irrelevant in favor of DEAF-SAME—and, in the process, racism, ableism, sexism, and other forms of ingrained systematic oppression go unacknowledged. This can lead to sharp contrasts and disconnects, as we show throughout this book, as people with relatively less power may have opposing perspectives and experiences in relation to being deaf in combination with their race, ethnicity, class, gender, and so on.

In summary, behaving “more deaf” or “deaf-first” makes comparisons possible, but is itself also the result of comparisons and a focus on differences. Indeed, “any conceptualization of cosmopolitanism starts from the premise of (radical) ‘difference’ which needs to be maintained (through boundaries) to allow would-be-cosmopolitans to overcome it in one way or the other” (Salazar, 2021b, pp. 4–5). The very act of “coming together as deaf signers with similar interests and behaviors” is a form of power-infused scale-making based on a history of comparing deaf lives between nations, with differences either temporarily put aside or made commensurable and consumable (see Chapter 5). But it is also through scaling and comparing that deaf cosmopolitanism is produced, which, as Appiah (2006) reminds us, is the challenge to interpersonal interactions, not the solution.

Bourdieu’s “Theory of Practice”

How, then, do mobile deaf people navigate different spaces on different scales? A useful framework for this question is Bourdieu’s “theory of practice,” underpinned by a trio of interrelated “thinking tools”—field, habitus, and capital—which some Deaf Studies scholars (mostly based in U.K. universities) have been making use of over the last decade (O’Brien, 2021a, 2021b; O’Brien & Emery, 2014; Richardson, 2019; Sommer Lindsay, 2022). Fields are social spaces, or arenas, with their own rules, produced by the social actors who inhabit them (Bourdieu, 1992); they can be clearly defined places, or more abstract, such as “education,” “the arts,” “bureaucracy,” and “religion.” Societies consist of interwoven and interrelated fields. Habitus is the way that human behavior is characterized by regularities and tendencies, also called dispositions. Behavior is structured by past and present circumstances and by the rules of particular fields—that is, through internalizing social expectations and value systems (Bourdieu, 1992). By being immersed in a field, people develop habitus, which is inherently dialectic: It is individual (unique for each, based on personal experiences and agency), but also social (its structure can be shared with others in the same field, and/or of the same class, ethnicity, and so on). When field and habitus “match,” people feel like a “fish in the water”; where habitus and field clash, they may feel like a “fish out of water.”

To a considerable extent, capital is synonymous with “power.” Bourdieu distinguishes between social capital (relationships with people that can be useful or important to proceed in life), economic capital (money, properties, skills that can be monetized), and cultural capital (cultural knowledge, educational qualifications, knowledge of one or more languages). Linguistic capital is often subsumed under cultural capital, but it is also discussed separately by Bourdieu (1992). In the Deaf Studies accounts that have used the Bourdieusian trio (or only the “capital” concept, as in De Meulder & Murray, 2021), the distinction of linguistic capital from other forms of capital has been crucial because of the minority status of, and oppression of, sign languages (O’Brien, 2021a). Forms of capital can be accumulated and “traded” and also have an impact on each other. For example, social capital and cultural capital (e.g., degrees) can lead to access to economic capital in the form of jobs, funding, or property.

Some authors have used other prefixes for capital than those of Bourdieu: For example, Sommer Lindsay (2022) used “deaf capital” for capital in deaf-specific and in hearing-led fields. Deaf capital is a summary term for deaf networks, sign language fluency, knowledge of deaf history, and deaf embodiment. Although pulling together these notions under the term deaf capital can be a useful approach, we do not use it as a catchall in this book; instead, we write about deaf people’s social capital, economic capital, cultural capital, and linguistic capital separately because these distinctions were important for our analysis of the data.

Bourdieu’s thinking tools have also been applied in studies of migration and mobility (e.g., Nowicka, 2015), showing that forms of capital are “valued, devalued, exchanged, and accumulated in the immigration experience” (Kelly & Lusis, 2006, p. 845). Forms of capital exist in relation to fields: The value of each form of capital depends on the field, and the prestige afforded by it (symbolic capital) can vary. Thus, forms of capital (e.g., degrees, currencies, savings, social networks, linguistic knowledge) acquired in a specific country (or another geographical entity) may be valued less elsewhere, impacting migrants’ strategies in job seeking, for example (see Chapters 4 and 8). Additionally, some forms of capital are valued more in transnational fields (i.e., on the transnational scale) than in specific nations (Joy et al., 2020), such as knowledge of English or IS (see Chapter 8) or certain contacts in social networks (see Chapter 7).

The concepts of “capital” and “field” are easily applicable to the study of international mobility, arguably more so than “habitus.” However, Kelly and Lusis (2006) have suggested that people who are internationally mobile also build up a repertoire of habitus in different fields (e.g., their habitus in nations of origin, in new nations, in transnational networks): “It seems quite possible that an individual could occupy multiple habiti simultaneously as different sets of taken-for-granted rules of practice, and evaluation of capital, are activated in different contexts” (p. 846). Indeed, people moving between different types of spaces on different scales (fields) are exposed to norms and rules in relation to those spaces, and in relation to the movements between them.

In this book, Chapters 3 and 4 make use of the trio of Bourdieu’s thinking tools when dealing with contexts of migration; capital is the one notion used throughout the whole book. Isolating this term is consistent with other Mobility Studies scholarship, where “capital” (e.g., “social capital”) is very often used without direct reference to Bourdieu’s other concepts. However, this does not necessarily mean that capital is discussed in isolation of the wider context—rather that other terminology is used to talk about fields, such as “scales,” “nations,” or “networks.” Indeed, we have found the catchall term “network capital,” borrowed from Mobility Studies (Elliott & Urry, 2010; Sheller & Urry, 2006b), to be useful in our analysis of the ways in which mobile deaf people tap into different networks at different scales (see Chapter 7). The term covers the combination of skills, documents, qualifications, capacity for physical movement, contacts, and access to communication devices and travel infrastructure that facilitate networking; furthermore, Kaufmann et al. (2004) see motility as another form of capital, explaining that this encompasses “interdependent elements relating to access to different forms and degrees of mobility, competence to recognize and make use of access, and appropriation of a particular choice, including the option of non-action” (p. 750). Access refers to the transportation and communication devices available; competence includes skills, licenses, and abilities (e.g., physical ability, permits, degrees, planning skills); appropriation refers to how the access and skills are then mobilized. There is thus a certain overlap between “network capital” and “motility as capital,” with the emphasis in the first concept being on the capacity to network, and the emphasis in the second concept being on the capacity to be mobile.

An Intersectional Lens in Deaf Ethnography

Mobilities research is concerned first with the patterning, timing, and causation of face-to-face copresence. What brings person to person? When? How often? […] Especially significant is the observation of how people effect a face-to-face relationship with places, with events and with people. (Sheller & Urry, 2006a, p. 217)

In the MobileDeaf study, face-to-face observation of deaf people who engaged in international mobility was undertaken: How do they move, where to, and how do they interact with other people? Although the team considered (and in some cases engaged with) widening the focus to include social media, the emphasis of our participant observation was on pre-pandemic face-to-face encounters between deaf people. We were mobile with our participants (see Bissell, 2009): accompanying them to the pubs and food joints in London where they met others, joining a tour group in Bali, moving around Kakuma refugee camp on the back of a motorcycle, traveling alongside hundreds of people to snowy towns in Italy for the Winter Deaflympics. In some of the field sites, we waited with people too: in line to meet officials in Kakuma Refugee Camp, in traffic in Bali, for sports competitions to start or end. In these and other sites where we moved and waited with people, observing and talking formed our key methods, as explained in Chapter 2.

To study the challenges of deaf cosmopolitanism, the lens of intersectionality was employed in an attempt to understand the importance and meaning of variables such as race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, educational background, and class in the context of international deaf spaces. Crenshaw (1989) coined the intersectionality concept to draw attention to multiple inequalities experienced by working-class black women in the United States. Intersectionality scholars initially focused on a gender–race–class triumvirate, showing that working-class black women are doubly or triply oppressed by patriarchy, racism, and classism. More dimensions have been added in studies of intersectionality over time, such as sexuality, religion, age, and (dis)ability; the concept is thus “flexible in its applicability and tied to its history in Black feminist theorizing” (May, 2015, p. 91). Since its inception, the term has been used in multiple disciplines in multiple ways, including as methodology, as an action word (used in policy discourse), as a theoretical framework, as a descriptive tool, and as analytical tool (Lutz, 2015). In this book, intersectionality is not treated as a theoretical framework, nor as a mere descriptive term. Rather than “a study of intersectionality,” the MobileDeaf team engaged in intersectional thinking throughout their methodology, in terms of both data gathering and analysis (see Lutz, 2015). We did so by avoiding “single-axis thinking,” which is defined by May (2015) as follows:

While intersectionality starts from the premise that our various identities and the many structures of power we live within and navigate should be understood as interconnected and enmeshed, conventional ways of conceptualizing identity or examining inequality tend to rely on either/or thinking and be “single-axis”—meaning that we are asked to examine (and address) race or class separately, or perhaps think about disability and sexuality, but insist that one factor be “primary” (they are still conceived of as separate, since one must be first or more significant). […] When single-axis models are relied on, the experiences and knowledge of some are often (falsely) universalized as if they could adequately represent the experiences, needs, and claims of all group members: this obscures within-group differences, the relationality of power, and interactions among and permeability between categories. Likewise, single-axis forms of redress adhere to, rather than challenge, the conceptual “building blocks” of domination—they leave the foundations of inequality intact and also reinforce them. (pp. 80–81)

One persistent form of single-axis thinking in Deaf Studies is talking about “deaf people” in general and subordinating all other identifications to that of “being deaf”; this is further explored in Chapter 9.

Using an intersectional lens, or using intersectionality as a theoretical framing, is both a trend and a necessity in Deaf Studies as a whole. Several Deaf Studies scholars have focused on intersectionality, whether or not they employed the term. Most of these studies have engaged in an intracategorical approach to intersectionality (McCall, 2005), which means looking at one specific social group that exists on a neglected point of intersection (e.g., black and deaf, queer and deaf; see Emery & Iyer, 2022, and Chapter 9 for references; see Ruiz-Williams et al., 2015, for an exception). The MobileDeaf team did not take an intracategorical approach to intersectionality, with the exception of the part of the London-based subproject that focused on deaf Indian female migrants. Additionally, most Deaf Studies authors studying intersectionality have used the intersectionality concept to focus on deaf racial, sexual, gender, and ethnic minorities within a country and not in the context of (international) mobilities (see Martens, 2020, for an exception). Patil (2013) has pointed out that most studies on intersectionality are based in one country and called this “domestic intersectionality”; this is in contrast to our approach.

There is a highly problematic tendency to use the intersectionality concept without reference to race. Yuval-Davis (2011) argues that “intersectional analysis should not be limited only to those who are on the multiple margins of society, but rather that the boundaries of intersectional analysis should encompass all members of society” (p. 8); that is, that intersectionality is produced in interactions and power relations between people, all of whom are characterized by race and/or ethnicity, gender, class, and so on. As May (2015) states, intersectionality’s interest is in “dismantling oppressive structures” (p. 32). However, another problematic tendency in intersectionality research is that the study of inequalities has, over time, often been sidelined—a development that has been heavily criticized (Lutz, 2015). There is a tendency to interpret intersectionality as a synonym for “diversity,” which is a reduction of the full meaning of the concept (May, 2015). The risk of using the term “identity” in the context of intersectionality is of falling into the trap of interpreting intersectionality as “multiple identities” (May, 2015). Therefore, by using intersectionality as a methodological lens and driver, rather than a theoretical framework, the MobileDeaf team intentionally avoided the language of identity, preferring the term “social locations” (Yuval-Davis, 2006), a concept that is akin to “positions” and understood as constellations that are time and context dependent rather than fixed characteristics possessed by individuals (further explained in Chapter 9).

Using intersectionality as a lens rather than as a theoretical framework, we adopted the definition of intersectionality as posited by Cho et al. (2013):

[W]hat makes an analysis intersectional […] is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. This framing—conceiving of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power—emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is. (p. 795, my emphasis)

This definition includes both the traditional focus on power, inequality, and oppression and the consideration of how intersections produce opportunities and/or empowerment. Throughout this book, we show (albeit without using the intersectionality concept as analytic) that people’s social locations shape (and are shaped by) mobility in that they have an impact on motility, on where people go, on what strategies they employ when they are mobile (e.g., how they present themselves, how they communicate), on with whom they connect, on how they network, on what forms of capital they can draw upon, and on how people experience their mobilities.

In other words, and linking back to our conceptual coffer, translocality needs to be studied through an intersectional lens (Anthias, 2012). As Thimm and Chaudhuri (2021) point out in their study on intersectionality and migration, “any particular individual has to negotiate multiple intersectional social locations at multiple scales simultaneously”; they suggest “scaling intersectionality by examining intersectionalities across transnational scales” (p. 278). This is necessary because “intersectional constellations of a person’s social locations can and typically will vary whether she is at home, at work or at a family gathering, for example, let alone if she is in her homeland or abroad” (p. 279). For example, gender values vary between contexts and countries within families, marriages, and work cultures (see Chapter 10 for examples).

Nevertheless, although we have used an intersectional lens, we have still privileged two social locations in our recruitment of participants and in our analysis: deafness and nationality. Our focus was on deaf people who were, for example, also queer, and/or Indian, and/or black, and/or a woman—but deafness, and being deaf signers, was the common factor. However, that does not mean that we treat “being deaf signers” as a totalizing status or axis of identification (see especially Chapter 9). May (2015) says that single-axis thinking—for example, thinking in terms of gender first or race first—is wrong, but she also argues that it is possible to focus on gender or race by taking an intersectional approach to gender or race. Our purpose was to do the same with regard to deafness. In Chapter 2, we explore the “double-edged sword” of doing deaf ethnography, pointing out that where deafness is a shared core identifier, deaf differences can come more sharply to the fore. At the same time, we acknowledge that we can only recognize, identify (with), or discuss intersections because of our own social locations and positionalities.

The second privileged social location in our study is nationality. We focus on international mobility, that is, deaf people of different nationalities who cross borders of nation-states. We are aware of the danger of methodological nationalism, such as “national” diversity coming first in our analysis at the cost of understanding ethnic and regional divisions. Our focus on “national” diversity also meant that other differences (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, class) were often subsumed under “national” identities. In Chapters 2 and 5, the implications, as well as the role of “the national,” are explored more in depth.

This Book

The way this book is structured reflects the way that the MobileDeaf project was structured. After Part One: Studying International Deaf Mobilities, consisting of this introduction and a methodology chapter, Part Two: A Spectrum of International Deaf Mobilities consists of four chapters. Each chapter contains a review of Deaf Studies literature relating to one type of deaf mobility (forced migration, labor/marriage migration, professional mobility, and tourist mobility), as well as an exploration of some themes and patterns that emerged during and from the case studies of the four subprojects. These chapters are primarily documentary for several reasons. We aimed to concentrate on each of these types of mobility in their own right, situating each subproject in relation to other studies of the same type of mobility (e.g., studies of deaf migrants, studies of deaf tourists) and demonstrating how it connects to and enhances this research area. We also use these chapters to provide background information about our field sites and the dynamics within them, allowing us to delve directly into specific examples in the chapters in Part Three: Patterns in International Deaf Mobilities. Although the chapters in Part Two are therefore more descriptive and less analytic than those in Part Three, we did engage with several of the analytics outlined within this chapter, particularly Bourdieu’s framework and discussions on scale. In these chapters, we also work with materials that were too voluminous for, or did not fit well in, Chapters 7–10 but were nevertheless key to the types of mobility under study. In this way, we are able to shed light on themes that are specific to each type of mobility.

In Part Three (Chapters 7–10), we present the themes we have identified and explored across the four subprojects and throughout the different types of mobilities. It is by exploring our data together as a team that we made note of the patterns that emerged across mobilities: the experiences of (not) belonging, the various language practices and ideologies in play, the features of deaf spaces and networks, the confrontations with limits to mobility. We had started with a much larger conceptual coffer, which we reduced through this shared exploration of our data to four keywords: networks, calibration, belonging, and immobility. These structure Part Three and came to function as a nexus to which other keywords were linked. By engaging with theories and analyzing the data from each subproject individually and collectively, we underscore the potential of Deaf Mobility Studies—not merely as Mobility Studies conducted by Deaf Studies scholars, but also in “deafening” Mobility Studies. The implications of this I discuss in the Conclusion, in which I reflect on key facets of the MobileDeaf project, from the challenges of understanding deaf cosmopolitanism to the conceptual coffer that directed our exploration, and the invaluable teamwork underpinning this endeavor. Finally, I address the present and expected societal impacts of the MobileDeaf project.