Doing Deaf Ethnography
Annelies Kusters, Steven Emery, Sanchayeeta Iyer, Amandine le Maire, and Erin Moriarty
Anthropologists interested in deaf people have engaged in ethnography, typically creating broad accounts of deaf lives and deaf community life in a particular country, city, or village (for an overview, see Friedner & Kusters, 2020). Surprisingly, however, ethnography has been underused within Deaf Studies as a whole. By doing ethnography, we can capture aspects of deaf lives that can be captured with no other approach. Ethnographers participate in people’s daily lives, observe what happens and what people say, engage in conversations, and ask questions informally. A continuum exists as to how the ethnographer is involved in the field, going from mostly observing to fully participating in the same activities as others. Field notes are taken to lay down details of observations, activities, and conversations (Atkinson & Hammersley, 2005; Blommaert & Dong, 2020; Emerson et al., 2011).
Ethnographers usually start from a set of broad questions, but they also let new themes and questions emerge within the research as they engage with people and learn about what keeps them occupied. Doing this, ethnographers identify recurring patterns in practices and discourses, and puzzle together a broad picture around a central set of themes. Ethnography can include scrutiny of language practices, studying closely how people communicate with each other and experience this—also called linguistic ethnography (Hou & Kusters, 2020). Participant observation is often complemented by ethnographic interviews, with the fieldworker’s observations informing the conversation during the interview. New information is triangulated by observing the phenomena or discourses under study in a variety of contexts, and by discussing the same themes with a variety of participants. In other words, ethnographers’ accounts are informed by the patterning and variability of the practices and discourses that they study.
In this chapter, we share, compare, and contrast the processes of doing ethnography in each of the four MobileDeaf subprojects: forced migration, labor and marriage migration, professional mobility, and tourist mobility. Although each subproject was undertaken independently, our research work was shaped by two overarching research questions. First, within the contexts of international deaf spaces, how does being deaf intersect with other social locations, particularly ethnicity, nationality, education, religion, and gender, and which meaningful connections or accumulated inequalities occur? Second, how do deaf signers in these contexts practice and experience international communication by calibrating, by learning and using multiple languages and language modalities, and by using International Sign (IS)? The questions were broad enough for us to keep an open gaze for salient themes within our respective research contexts, and specific enough to guide our research.
In ethnographies of deaf transnationalism, well-connected deaf people from Global North countries are disproportionately likely to be selected as participants (see studies in Friedner & Kusters, 2015a). For example, Haualand et al. (2015) admit that their study published in 2002 was focused on “a global deaf elite [who] had the money and resources to travel and a strong drive or interest in networking and connecting with deaf people from other countries” (p. 49). In the MobileDeaf project, we wanted to portray a wide variety of experiences of international mobility (leisurely, difficult, privileged, disprivileged) and of people with a wide range of backgrounds.
The prerequisite was that our participants had engaged in international deaf mobility, because the MobileDeaf project’s focus was on deaf people of different nationalities crossing national borders. We focused on the deaf people who do the crossing but also on the deaf people who engage with people who do the crossing, such as deaf tourist guides, deaf hosts of events, and deaf teachers in the host countries. The focus on national affiliation as a core variable in our research was warranted by the fact that our focus was on international mobility (see Chapter 5). However, we had to constantly keep in mind that national affiliation is one variable in an intersectional analysis and not the overarching one. By using an intersectional lens (see Chapter 1), we were able to pay attention to some neglected points of intersection. However, we experienced limitations with regard to how much a single researcher could cover in a subproject, in combination with the limitations of our own positionalities. As a result, we applied an intersectional lens in different ways to the different subprojects. For example, experiences of sexual orientation and class were mostly studied within the subproject on labor migration, and disability was studied in the professional mobility subproject.
The MobileDeaf team consisted of five deaf researchers: the principal investigator, two postdoctoral researchers, and two doctoral students. Each of MobileDeaf’s four subprojects was undertaken by one researcher, except for the project on migration to London, which was undertaken by two people. Even though MobileDeaf was not the first multisited team ethnography in Deaf Studies (see Breivik et al., 2002), what set the project apart was that the team of ethnographers comprised all deaf signers. This decision was both methodological and political. Methodologically, it increased the likelihood of successfully communicating and connecting with our deaf research participants (although this also depended on our positionalities, see below); studying our own experiences as mobile deaf people was also a core part of the methodology. Furthermore, it was political because Deaf Studies has been largely undertaken and led by hearing scholars, a pattern that would be unthinkable in, for example, Women’s Studies and Black Studies, although it is also common in Maori Studies (O’Brien & Emery, 2014). Structural audism in all levels of education and workplaces (whether deaf-specific or mainstream) has had a huge impact on the position of deaf scholars in academia (Chua et al., 2022; Kusters et al., 2017b; O’Brien, 2020). Historically, most deaf researchers worked as research assistants under hearing project leaders. Research design and data analysis were thus generally initiated and concluded by hearing people. An increase in deaf-led studies has already brought about shifts in research foci, methodologies, theories, and writing styles (see chapters in Kusters et al., 2017a). We see our use of ethnography—and autoethnography—as part of this shift; we elaborate on this later.
The purpose of this chapter is two-fold: first, to explain how we built up the data shared in the following chapters, and second, to explore what it means to do ethnography with deaf research participants. Because ethnography has been underused in Deaf Studies, further exploration is needed into what it means to employ this approach in the study of deaf people’s experiences, to build on the few accounts that have been published on this topic. By comparing our respective methodological journeys, taking into account our positionalities, we are able to shed light on a variety of strategies and procedures used in deaf ethnographies. Although we had a common set of overarching questions, our ethnographies were very different. The range of settings and temporalities of each subproject led us to engage in traditional long-term ethnography, multisited ethnography, and online ethnography. In this chapter, we discuss only the methods that all of us engaged in and that are key to ethnography: participant observation and interviewing. We have also made use of visual methods including mapping, drawings, photo/video elicitation, and language portraits in various subprojects; these are not discussed in this chapter but are mentioned elsewhere in the book where relevant.
Ethnography is predicated on making connections with others, and our shared deafness certainly facilitated these connections. Across each subproject, we engaged with deaf people from a wide variety of backgrounds; thus, we used and built up “calibration” skills communicating across different sign languages (see Chapter 8), a crucial facet of the research practice of deaf scholars researching internationally (Breivik et al., 2002; Dikyuva et al., 2012). Tapping into and expanding different types of networks was also necessary (see Chapter 7). Among us, we had access to a range of all-deaf or mostly deaf international spaces (e.g., workplaces, workshops, conferences, social gatherings, classrooms, domestic spaces), some of which would have been difficult or impossible for hearing researchers to access.
As other deaf researchers have reported previously, we experienced that deaf research participants said they were willing to share their experiences with us because we are deaf (see Kusters et al., 2017b, for a literature review of methodologies by deaf scholars). However, the question of how other characteristics—such as deaf researchers’ race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, cultural background, language background, class, and so on—also have an impact on research has been understudied (for exceptions, see Kusters, 2012; Hou, 2017). Some of us worked with research assistants to complement our positionalities. Later in this chapter and book, we reflect on the complex ways that the positionality of the researchers and assistants, in combination with the positionality of participants, shaped the research.
A key method of the MobileDeaf project was video-recording observations. In observational filming, the camera is treated as if it is in the background, recording the ordinary details of everyday lives and resulting in multilayered, “thick” data. These recordings allowed us to reexamine what people did and how they communicated (Kusters et al., 2016; Moriarty, 2020b). Video-recording data is crucial in linguistic ethnographies dealing with signed languages (Hou & Kusters, 2020): Through multiple viewings of a single filmed encounter, the data become thicker as more detail is noticed. Yet, our recordings of interactions were not merely for analysis: They were used to create ethnographic films, a type of documentary film based on research. The findings are not only gathered and analyzed but also disseminated in their original (but edited) form. This is important in Deaf Studies because deaf signers are often studied and represented in ways that ultimately obscure the nature of sign languages, as well as the participants’ expertise, subjective experiences, and participation in the process. The creation of the MobileDeaf films was a cooperative effort among the researchers, research assistants, and filmmakers. We discuss the process in our film Birthing a Genre: Deaf Ethnographic Film.1
Our collaborations gradually led to common insights, and in this chapter, we outline and analyze our processes. By considering four subprojects separately and together, we offer a broad and varied picture of the shapes that deaf ethnography can take.
Team Constitution
Our positionalities and privileges, which are related to our social locations (e.g., race, gender, language backgrounds, nationality, class, educational background, family background, previous mobility experiences), have had a profound impact on the type of data we have gathered. In this section, we outline our personal journeys into the MobileDeaf project. We show how we drew on the network capital we had built throughout our lives and how we expanded them in our research (see Chapters 1 and 7 for a discussion of network capital). We thus see the biographies below as a starting point for considering our positionalities throughout the chapter and the book rather than as the end of the discussion of positionality. Importantly, our journeys show how the growth of our personal and professional identities and networks was rooted in local, national, and international deaf mobilities, the key theme of this book. Different types of international mobility have shaped our own lives in profound ways. We thus not only research international deaf mobility, but also lead international, deaf, hypermobile lives; this formed the impetus for this study, as well as becoming part of our study.
Annelies Kusters
Annelies is the MobileDeaf team leader, whose focus was the subproject on professional mobility. She is a white, deaf, cisgendered woman in her late 30s, from Flanders, Belgium, who has been mobile to, and has lived in, several countries. She and one of her four siblings were born deaf, and Annelies grew up participating in Dutch-speaking mainstream education. Her hearing parents did not sign despite her father being a teacher of the deaf; her mother was a homemaker. Annelies could only communicate in spoken language one-to-one with certain people, and with difficulty; her best means of communication and learning was through reading and writing, and she completed her education through self-study. At university, Annelies studied anthropology; when selecting a topic for her master’s dissertation at the KU Leuven (University of Leuven), one option was “deaf culture,” supervised by a hearing, nonsigning professor specializing in the anthropology of disability. He recommended to her several books on deaf culture and deaf history; this marked the start of a new chapter in her life. Learning about the richness and diversity of deaf cultures, that plenty of deaf people “arrive late” in deaf communities, and that her personal history was part of a wider deaf history, led her to realize that she could “arrive late” too.
Annelies started to learn sign languages in rapid succession. She joined a deaf club in Flanders, where she learned Flemish Sign Language (VGT). She went to Suriname for her dissertation research in 2004 and there learned some Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), which was used in the local school. She volunteered in a deaf school in Ghana in 2006 and picked up some Ghanaian Sign Language (GSL). While working on her Master of Science and doctoral degrees in Deaf Studies at the University of Bristol, she learned British Sign Language (BSL); there, she was required to write in English rather than Dutch. Having met her husband at a deaf youth conference in India in 2006, she undertook research in India in 2007 for her Master of Science dissertation and started to learn Indian Sign Language (ISL). She learned Adamorobe Sign Language while conducting doctoral research in a village in Ghana in 2008–2009 (Kusters, 2015). She learned IS loosely in parallel with the sign languages listed previously, initially at the European Union of the Deaf Youth (EUDY) camp in Dublin in 2006, and she uses it in several domains of her personal and professional life. To make these mobilities possible, Annelies took employment while studying full time, vigorously applied for funding and scholarships, and made limited budgets stretch.
After marrying, Annelies lived in India (2010–2013), using mostly ISL with her husband, his deaf family, his friends, and their first son, who was born in Mumbai. Annelies finished her doctorate in India and worked as an independent researcher while applying for funding. The family experienced a period of financial insecurity until they moved to Germany in 2013, where Annelies obtained her first academic job. In Germany, she gave birth to her second child. When Annelies obtained funding from the European Research Council (ERC) for the MobileDeaf project in 2017, the family moved to Edinburgh. Annelies and her children have never experienced barriers to obtaining visas with their Belgian passports; they are also Overseas Citizens of India, permitted to travel to, live, and work in India visa-free. In contrast, her Indian husband has navigated a large number of bureaucratic hurdles for marriage and migration, and he has always been on a temporary visa or residence permit outside India.
As a deaf anthropologist, Annelies’s first ethnography in Suriname investigated the meeting spaces and networks of Paramaribo’s urban deaf community; in Ghana, she researched in Adamorobe village, where a locally emerged sign language is used by both deaf and hearing people due to the historically high incidence of hereditary deafness. In India, she focused on deaf spaces in suburban train compartments for people with disabilities, and on multimodal languaging (calibration) between deaf and hearing people in Mumbai’s public spaces. The idea for the MobileDeaf project grew from this body of research and also from her observations and experiences during her own international mobilities.
Amandine le Maire
Within MobileDeaf, Amandine focuses on forced migration. She is a Belgian, white, cisgendered woman in her early 30s. She was born deaf to deaf parents, who used Langue des Signes Francophone de Belgique (LSFB) to communicate with her; she also learned some ASL from her father, who had studied at Gallaudet University, and from deaf American family friends. ASL was her father’s first sign language because he had grown up using speech. Amandine’s mother’s family is from the north of Belgium, where the primary language used is Dutch. Through her mother’s family, Amandine learned some Dutch.
After a few years in a deaf school where the main languages were French, LSFB, and cued speech,2 Amandine was enrolled at age 7 in a mainstream school, supported by sign language interpreters using cued speech and LSFB. After high school, she stayed for 9 months in Denmark to take part in Frontrunners, an international deaf leadership program, where she learned IS through communicating with deaf peers from around the world. During Frontrunners, she undertook an internship in South America and worked as a volunteer in a youth camp organized by a Chilean deaf organization.
After returning to Belgium, she continued her bachelor of arts studies in anthropology at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), inspired by her father’s passion for deaf history and her mother’s passion for deaf arts; she felt that anthropology would support a career in Deaf Studies research. Participation in the Erasmus exchange program enabled her to return to Denmark for 6 months of study, where she became interested in deaf migration. She wrote her bachelor’s thesis on deaf families moving from Copenhagen to Malmö (Sweden) to access sign language medium education. Her master’s thesis at Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) covered the relocation of many deaf Belgian families to Namur, initially due to the presence of a bilingual deaf school there but, later, for various, more complex reasons.
During her studies, Amandine traveled to engage with deaf people around the world. She volunteered in deaf schools in Turkey and Bolivia and participated in the EUDY camp in Bulgaria (2014) and in the World Federation of the Deaf Youth Section (WFDYS) camp in South Africa (2011); she was Camp Director of the EUDY Junior camp in Belgium in 2014. She was also a board member and president of FFSB-Jeunes, a deaf youth association in Belgium, for several years, during which time she participated as a delegate in the General Assemblies of EUDY and WFDYS. Later, she was involved in Des Mains pour Dieu, a deaf Belgian Christian association, participating in a European Deaf Christian Youth (EDCY) conference in Germany, where she met her deaf husband, who is from Northern Ireland.
After graduating with her master’s in anthropology, Amandine started an enterprise called MUSK in Namur with a deaf colleague, focusing on visual media and accessibility through sign language. She obtained certificates enabling her to interpret in legal settings and to act as a deaf museum guide. Amandine then moved to Edinburgh to start her doctorate with the MobileDeaf team, learning BSL—which she continues to use every day with her husband. Although her academic writing has previously been in French, she has now shifted to writing in English too.
Steven Emery
Steve focuses on the labor migration subproject. Steve is a British, white, cisgendered man who was in his mid to late 50s during the project. Steve comes from a family of laborers and grew up, sometimes in poverty, in working-class communities. He became deaf at the age of 4 from meningitis. His formative education was spent in mainstream schools, including, between ages 5 and 12, one of the earliest Partially Hearing Units (PHUs) in the United Kingdom, where he socialized with other deaf as well as hearing children. Between the ages of 12 and 16, he was the only deaf child in the school. On leaving secondary education at 16, he became a cleaner at a print factory and later became a typesetter. However, from ages 17 to 19, he experienced extreme isolation, with no friends outside of work.
He gradually gained class consciousness through the collective experiences of printworkers battling for fair wages and working conditions, and he took an active role in a trade union. His interest in migration stems from his engagement in far left-wing political activism in the 1980s because the Left takes a strong stance against racism and border controls. In his late 20s, Steve started to socialize with deaf people, and he also began to learn BSL. He began a full-time degree in cultural studies at age 27. During this time, he learned about deaf history, deaf culture, and the oppression of deaf people by society. After graduating in 1992, Steve worked in a variety of community development and counseling roles with local deaf people. Learning about deaf people’s real-life experiences—and being involved in campaigning for BSL language rights—led him back to university in 2002 to undertake his doctoral degree in citizenship. Since graduating in 2007, his career has predominantly been in research and higher education. Although his doctorate and middle-class career has bestowed him with “status,” Steve continues to identify strongly with international working-class struggles; a focus on class has thus pervaded his MobileDeaf research. Steve also identifies as disabled, particularly due to his experiences of mental health distress throughout his life; indeed, these experiences, along with his work as a counselor, adviser, and community development worker, have meant that he was profoundly aware of the adverse experiences of many migrant deaf people he was meeting.
Steve has been constantly mobile—a “lifelong sojourner”—since he finished formal education in 1979. Having grown up in Brighton, he was resident in London 1984–1991 (ages 22–29), during which he lived in seven different places across the city, saving up his wages, quitting his job, backpacking abroad, and returning to a new address and employment. He spent 3 months touring the United States, another 3 months crossing Europe, and 7 months on a round-the-world trip. Steve solely met hearing people while traveling; he was not then fully engaged with his identity as a deaf person.
Steve has lived in eight other cities and towns in the United Kingdom; in the Republic of Ireland for 18 months in 2001; and in Washington, DC, for 6 months in 2013 when working at Gallaudet University. He then moved to Colombia to be with his Colombian hearing girlfriend, whom he married the same year; however, he struggled to find work, moving back to the United Kingdom a year and a half later. Along the way, he picked up bits of ASL, Colombian Sign Language, Irish Sign Language, and IS.
Steve’s life has thus featured frequent professional and leisure mobility, as well as international migration for relationships. He holds a British passport due to having been born in the country, which has brought with it travel privileges; he has been able to cross the world without facing many bureaucratic barriers. When living in Colombia, he was granted a cedula as the spouse of a Colombian citizen, which gave him rights to work there with few restrictions. In contrast, his then-wife had to meet stricter criteria to remain in the United Kingdom long term.
Sanchayeeta Iyer
Sanchayeeta focuses on marriage migration. She is a British, brown, cisgendered woman in her mid-40s, born in the northwest of London to hearing, immigrant parents. Her South Indian father immigrated to England in the late 1960s for employment, working as a civil servant until his retirement. Her Keralan mother came to London after an arranged marriage in the late 1970s and worked as a secretary in the Indian Embassy. Both parents were in full-time employment, and Sanchayeeta and her siblings were often in the care of an immigrant childcare worker. Sanchayeeta contracted meningitis and became deaf around age 2. Her parents had limited support, with no extended family in the city; nor were they active in local South Indian networks. Her mother left the embassy after the death of Sanchayeeta’s youngest brother at age 3 (when Sanchayeeta was 8 years old), switching to “low-skilled” employment and subsequently returning to India for her mental health; she came back 3 years later. From age 8, Sanchayeeta looked after her younger siblings at home alone; following her mother’s departure, she and her younger sister had to take up the household responsibilities and care for their baby brother. She and her family lived in a highly multicultural borough, and they experienced racism and xenophobia in both the borough and the city.
Sanchayeeta attended mainstream schools: a primary with a PHU and a secondary with a Sensory Support Unit. She used Sign Supported English (SSE). Her experience of schooling was negative due to racist and audist attitudes from hearing teachers and fellow students, as well as barriers to education. Only when studying for her GCSEs (the advanced stage of secondary education) did she receive full-time SSE provision. Sanchayeeta was not immersed in the deaf world or BSL until she was in her early 20s. She attended various mainstream colleges in London to study for A levels and a diploma, during which time she socialized with deaf ethnic people and deaf migrants, and she volunteered with the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD). There, she became interested in geography and international development. She participated in a youth development program with The Prince’s Trust, Raleigh International, taking part in a 3-month expedition in Chile in 2000. She signed up for Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), taking time off from her bachelor of arts degree to do a year-long placement with the Philippines Federation of the Deaf (2003–2004).
This year was a turning point: By immersing herself in the deaf Filipino community and using Filipino Sign Language with them, Sanchayeeta’s deaf identity ignited. As a research assistant for Dr. Liza Martinez (director of the Philippine Deaf Resource Center), she conducted a study with deaf Filipino women in institutions in Manila and Cebu into awareness of sexual reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases. Returning to the United Kingdom, she completed her degree in Geography and Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London). Her preferred language was now BSL, and in 2006 she joined the management committee of the Asian Deaf Women’s Association, later the Deaf Ethnic Women’s Association (DEWA). She was a trustee of Aurora Deaf Aid Africa (ADAA) during 2014–2019, visiting the deaf community in Kigali, Rwanda, in this capacity. Her first experience with participating in a large international deaf space was at the 2007 WFDY camp in Madrid, which was also her first encounter with IS.
For more than a decade following her bachelor of arts degree, Sanchayeeta worked with deaf children with additional needs. Disillusioned by the school system’s failures, in 2013 she applied for a scholarship from the European Union of the Deaf (EUD) for a short course, Deaf Children, Youth, and International Development, hosted by the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and Royal Dutch Kentalis in Den Haag, The Netherlands (2014). This motivated her to take up a master’s degree in Children, Youth, and International Development at Birkbeck, University of London. She also worked as a BSL teacher to migrant parents and guardians with young deaf children—an eye-opening experience because Sanchayeeta had not been exposed to the day-to-day struggles of migrant parents and guardians during her previous employment. After completing her master’s degree, she returned to DEWA as a project coordinator until she was offered a position as a doctoral researcher with MobileDeaf.
Erin Moriarty
Erin is a deaf, white, cisgendered woman in her 40s from the northeastern United States. She was born in Syracuse, New York, to hearing, working-class parents; her father was a plumber and her mother worked in health administration. Realizing that Erin was deaf at 18 months old, they learned how to sign, using Signed Exact English (SEE) in accordance with the dominant deaf education philosophy in Syracuse at the time. In preschool and primary school, Erin attended a deaf program within a hearing school, and she had a small group of deaf SEE-signing peers.
Except for one year at the Model Secondary School for the Deaf (MSSD), Erin attended mainstream school with an ASL interpreter. She learned ASL from her peers at camp and MSSD, becoming immersed in the deaf community. After high school, Erin attended Smith College, an elite all-women’s college in New England, where she discovered anthropology and museum studies. After Smith, she lived in Los Angeles briefly, hoping to break into the museum field. She then got a writing job at a dot.com news aggregation service in Washington, DC, through her Smith network. Unhappy working in a hearing environment with limited access provision, Erin moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to work for the Communication Service for the Deaf (CSD), where she was given leadership roles and became part of a national network of deaf business and political leaders. She realized how empowering an all-deaf environment can be.
After 3 years at CSD, Erin moved back to the Northeast, working at Gallaudet University as a development officer and later as communications officer for then-President Robert Davila. Returning to an academic environment prompted Erin to enroll at American University for a doctoral degree in anthropology, during which she worked full-time at Gallaudet and later at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a research-oriented environment. During her doctoral program, both employers gave Erin unpaid leave to travel to Cambodia for first 1 and then 3 months of research, during which Erin learned and used Cambodian Sign Language. For her third fieldwork period, she won a place in the first-ever cohort of the highly competitive Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship, which funded 10 months in Cambodia in 2014–2015.
Erin did not become fully immersed in Deaf Studies, or even consider herself a Deaf Studies scholar, until she moved to Edinburgh to work with the MobileDeaf team. During work on her doctoral program, she had felt pressure to distance herself from the canon of Deaf Studies in favor of mainstream anthropological theory and literature; she was concerned about being marginalized as a Deaf Studies scholar and was wary of the older canon’s descriptive, white-deaf identity-based work. More innovative work in deaf anthropology started appearing around 2015, at which point Erin joined a cohort of deaf anthropologists.
How Did We Become a Team?
Our personal backgrounds contain considerable experience of various types of mobility. We have all spent long periods in other countries, whether researching, studying, working, volunteering, or traveling. At the time of the MobileDeaf project, three of us were in international marriages. We have all experienced privileged mobilities; some of us have also lived abroad unemployed and in challenging life circumstances. Most of us intensively interacted with disprivileged deaf people in the Global South before joining the MobileDeaf team. We have all accumulated knowledge of various sign languages. Thus, international deaf mobility was key to our personal lives before we started the project; this continued throughout the project, as three of us were migrants to the United Kingdom (where MobileDeaf is hosted), and three of us did MobileDeaf fieldwork abroad. We bring these experiences and networks to the project and into this book.
So, how was the MobileDeaf team assembled? When Annelies applied to the ERC for €1.5 million funding for the MobileDeaf project, she envisaged an international deaf team consisting of experienced and less experienced scholars with degrees in anthropology and cultural studies. In particular, she wanted to combine the in-depth study of underresearched themes with capacity development and network building for deaf scholars. The starting point was the research interests of individual people whose profiles fit the project and whom she already knew were interested in the theme of international mobility; she wrote the proposal around her own and those people’s interests and experiences. Steve had undertaken a postdoc at the University of Bristol, where Annelies did her doctoral work, and he had already (unsuccessfully) applied for funding to study deaf migration. As a fellow deaf anthropologist, Annelies knew of Erin’s work in Cambodia and her continued interest in deaf tourism. Annelies knew Amandine from Belgium, where Amandine had completed her master’s in anthropology focusing on migration; Annelies knew Amandine was interested in pursuing a doctoral degree in mobility. This is a classic example of how large research proposals are often the products of existing networks among people, in this case deaf networks (see Chapter 7).
Using networks to design a project can be empowering because it enables the creation of an all-deaf team. However, it also sustains patterns of exclusion. Very few deaf people had the necessary research profile for this project, and the initial team was entirely white, in effect perpetuating a problematic pattern whereby Deaf Studies remains predominantly white Deaf Studies (Dunn & Anderson, 2020; Emery & Iyer, 2022; Ruiz-Williams et al., 2015). Even when research happens with deaf black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC) and with deaf people in the Global South, many of the researchers have themselves been white deaf and hearing people from the Global North. Later in the MobileDeaf project, a person from an ethnic minority joined the team. When Steve was seeking a research assistant for the London project, Sanchayeeta was recommended by a professional contact; while working together, Steve noted her interest in conducting more research and that she had the right skills and knowledge. Sanchayeeta then switched from research assistant to doctoral student within the project. This is another example of how networking leads to opportunities. Sanchayeeta joining the team had a profound impact on MobileDeaf in several ways. As an insider in the ethnic deaf community of London, she brought new insights and understandings. It was due to her that we could include stories from people to whom we would likely not have had access. This collaboration should not be taken for granted because it was not easy for Sanchayeeta to join a predominantly white team.
How Did We Work as a Team?
How did our team work together, and what did it mean for us to have deaf colleagues? Our language use was varied and typical for international deaf groups. The two British team members usually used BSL, and BSL was also the sign language that surrounded us in our department at Heriot-Watt University. However, this did not mean that the team always defaulted to using BSL. Calibration (see Chapter 8) was not merely something we studied but also something we ourselves did and continue to do, both with each other and in other situations in our everyday lives. BSL, ASL, and IS were used to various extents, with some VGT, LSFB, and fingerspelled French. Gradually, the language use shifted toward more BSL, although we continued to mix sign languages. Amandine sometimes found the differences confusing between Northern Irish BSL and the BSL used in our university. Sanchayeeta sometimes got her signing mixed up with Filipino Sign Language. Annelies struggled to separate IS and BSL, and Erin kept incorporating Cambodian signs and ASL in her signing. This did not pose problems for us; we valued the flexible languaging environment.
The types of meetings we had included reading groups, writing meetings, documentary film discussions, and project meetings. Of these, only reading groups were held regularly throughout the project, initially in person and then online during the coronavirus pandemic. These presented an invaluable opportunity to critically discuss and digest articles or books relevant to our research interests, covering translanguaging, intersectionality, mobilities, language ideologies, globalization, ethnographic filmmaking, and visual methods. Some materials came from within Deaf Studies, whereas others were not about deaf people. Through our discussions, we built a common frame of reference; we were also able to practice discussing these English concepts and English texts in sign languages. Sometimes, we coined ad hoc signs for concepts we used frequently, such as “cosmopolitanism” or “translocality.” Sometimes, these signs stuck; other times, they didn’t.
The reading groups grew into a space to discuss all matters relating to being a deaf academic. We talked about our research positionality, our findings, our lives and research experiences (sometimes from many years ago), and being a deaf academic in a hearing-dominated system. Team members with more extensive research experience offered advice to the doctoral students on the team, but we all mentored each other as peers. In years 4–6 of the project, the reading groups enabled us to identify common patterns across the four subprojects because we drew on examples from our field sites when discussing texts. The reading group was thus key to forging and maintaining ties within the MobileDeaf team; we also believe that reading groups are productive for growing and sharing knowledge even when researchers are not working within an overarching project.
Tapping Into Networks and Identifying Locations
Ethnographers allocate time to specific places, closely observing and engaging with people within those contexts. The accessibility of these places and the willingness of people to participate as research subjects are greatly influenced by the researcher’s positionality. What determines the choice of these places and participants? Places are usually selected with the aim of observing people’s practices in relation to the specific research questions. As for participants, there are typically one or more key participants with whom the ethnographer builds rapport and interacts most. In unfamiliar places, researchers often are guided by gatekeepers and leaders, who introduce them to participants. Relatedly, a popular method to expand networks is snowball sampling, in which participants point the researcher toward other potential participants (Bryman, 2012). Deaf researchers have made use of their own deaf networks to locate potential deaf participants in other countries (Boland et al., 2015; Dikyuva et al., 2012), and, in our biographies above, we discussed the personal mobilities through which we have built up networks. Making use of and expanding these networks was key to our ethnographies; “networks” even became a keyword in our data analysis (see Chapter 7).
Within the different subprojects, we did not all draw on our networks to the same extent. Although Amandine and Erin explored a country new to them, Annelies did fieldwork in a mixture of familiar contexts and new settings, and Steve and Sanchayeeta carried out research in the city where they live. Below, we discuss our strategies in each of these contexts, beginning with the labor migration project.
When commencing this project, initially without Sanchayeeta, Steve had to actively look for places where deaf migrants gather. There were no noticeable or identifiable places, spaces, or organizations that specifically drew deaf migrants in London, so Steve attended as many London deaf events as possible to get an idea of which ones were attracting deaf migrants. Steve also contacted two deaf British Asian people whom he already knew; they advised him where to go, and he then made regular visits to, for example, Beckton Deaf Club and a “Deaf Café” evening in Redbridge, which were cited as two places where deaf migrants frequented. This is how he started to expand his existing network to specifically study the experiences of deaf migrants.
In all the spaces where he was observing, Steve initially approached the event’s contact person to introduce himself and explain his research aims. He often would then start communicating with different deaf people and in that way learn who were migrants and who were born in the United Kingdom. This was not difficult to do because the events tended to be small and, as a new face at many of them, people would ask him about himself and what he was doing there. Thereafter, whenever Steve attended, he would be known. Deaf people were keen to support the research and would often point out deaf migrants or introduce them to Steve.
During his visits, Steve learned about other events taking place elsewhere, and he found participants via snowball sampling. This process enabled Steve to access some aspects of London deaf life that were less visible, or even deliberately hidden, and that migrants attended (e.g., a Hare Krishna event, cryptocurrency events). Steve thus acquired a broad overview of where deaf migrants gathered, and he realized how dispersed, irregular, and precarious many of these spaces were (see Chapters 4 and 7). It gradually became evident that City Lit (City Literary Institute, an adult education college in Holborn, London, popular for deaf education and BSL tuition) was a key place where many migrants studied and/or congregated with British deaf people, and where migrants’ networks converged. Most of the fieldwork became focused there.
Although Steve was able to meet and observe deaf migrants in a wide variety of settings across the capital, he ultimately struggled to recruit people to engage with the research project via formal or informal interviews. Some migrants told Steve they were supportive of the research aims but did not feel they were the right people to become involved, suggesting that they were “not intelligent enough” for the research. An alternative explanation for the reluctance of deaf City Lit students in particular is that they may have become fatigued with being repeatedly asked to be filmed for college-based work, such as BSL portfolios. However, it is equally likely that they were uncertain of Steve’s motives, and Steve suspected his various forms of privilege—his whiteness, Britishness (i.e., nonmigrant status), and class status (as an academic)—were factors. Although he was a deaf London resident, Steve was an outsider in terms of the migrant networks with whom he was aiming to engage. The political climate is also worth mentioning: The research was taking place just after the 2016 vote by U.K. citizens to leave the European Union, and this could well have been a factor in migrants’ reluctance to be involved in research touching on their status.
As his fieldwork continued, Steve became increasingly conscious of his privilege as a citizen with a U.K. passport and thus with more freedom to travel and work than the deaf people he was seeking to interview. Many were in precarious positions: He met one person who was due to be immediately deported, another who had been threatened by other (hearing) migrants, and one who was undocumented and at risk of deportation at any moment. Trying to build trust with people across a vast urban sprawl was a new experience for Steve, too, whose previous research meetings and events had generally relied on his existing networks within the British deaf community.
This is the context in which Steve sought a female research assistant from a minority ethnic or migrant background to work with him in interviews, ethnographic filming, and other research activities, including observations at City Lit. Sanchayeeta was able to tap into the personal and professional networks she had built up in schools and organizations, including her contacts in the ethnic deaf community in London. Within a year, Sanchayeeta was promoted to doctoral researcher and developed her own research focus within the London subproject, researching the experiences of several deaf Indian women who had arrived in London around the same time as newlyweds. Some of these participants she met through her interviews with Steve, and others were identified through snowball sampling. Sanchayeeta’s doctoral focus thus emerged from, and was embedded within, the larger subproject on migration.
Even after Sanchayeeta became involved in the project, there were varying rates of success in recruiting participants at City Lit, particularly for the ethnographic film Finding Spaces to Belong,3 suggesting that Steve’s race and gender were not the only factors in play. When people did state why they did not wish to participate, they gave many reasons. Some feared for their lives if they were seen on film, others feared a negative impact on their immigration status, and others did not want to participate for religious reasons (e.g., having converted to a different religion and not wanting to make this public). Some migrants were not confident that they had valuable information to offer. In other cases, students opened up after a few weeks, and visiting City Lit regularly was thus important for building relationships with participants (although it caused confusion for some in an English class who assumed the researchers were there to learn English). It is crucial to find a sensitive balance between taking the time to build up trust and convince people their stories are worth sharing, and respecting people’s decision not to participate.
As well as observing classes at City Lit, Steve and Sanchayeeta became involved in events that deaf migrants attended, and the two researchers set up and ran events themselves. They organized a screening of Double Discrimination,4 deaf filmmaker Rinkoo Barpaga's documentary about racism in the British deaf community, at the Stratford Picturehouse's monthly 888 Club for deaf people, at which Steve had previously met many deaf migrants. The film was shown to stimulate discussion on racism in relation to migrant experiences. Steve and Sanchayeeta also presented their research at events attended by migrants, such as “Deaf Day” at City Lit and a Black History Month event. These were valuable spaces for research because they helped to identify potential interviewees and to collect evidence on deaf migrant experiences.
Whereas Steve and Sanchayeeta were able to tap into existing contacts within the city in which they lived and to use their existing networks to identify places where deaf migrants met, Erin had to navigate a country new to her. In her subproject on deaf tourism in Asia, Erin aimed to include deaf tourists, deaf people who cater to tourists, and deaf people who experience the effects of deaf tourism (e.g., in schools and organizations). Erin had initially planned to return to Cambodia, where she had studied deaf tourism (Moriarty Harrelson, 2015). However, following the closure of the deaf-owned hostel where she had planned to stay and observe, she changed her field site to Bali. This was becoming an epicenter of deaf tourism, partly due to interest in Bengkala (a village with a high percentage of deaf residents and where a local sign language, Kata Kolok, is used) and because of the popularity of a deaf tourist guide, Wahyu Cahyadi (“Bali Deaf Guide”), who had been featured in the social media posts of American deaf travel influencers Joel Barish and Calvin Young. Erin found out during her fieldwork that there was another deaf guide working in Indonesia: Giovanni Mansilla, a deaf man originally from France who supplies tours for deaf tourists for Travass, a travel business run by a hearing Indonesian friend, Adelia Kiranmala.
Whereas London had key locations where deaf migrants met, in Bali there was a lack of central physical places, such as cafés or hotels, where deaf tourists gathered. Given this context, it was challenging for Erin to decide where to be based. First, she stayed in Ubud because most deaf tourists seemed to go there; later, she realized that many seemed to be in the south, so she moved to Canggu. However, it ended up being more practical for Erin to meet Wahyu at the hotels where tourists were staying. Because deaf tourist activity in Bali is decentralized, Wahyu became a nexus for this subproject.
An initial challenge with recruiting participants was that, unlike the subprojects on migration in London and Kenya, time spent by tourists in Bali is limited. Most people visit Bali for 10 days to 2 weeks, giving fewer opportunities to spend time with individual tourists. It was also difficult for Erin to predict who would be traveling in Bali while she was there. Realizing the need to be proactive in finding participants, Erin posted a 2-minute video on Facebook explaining who she was, describing the project and its objectives, and asking people to contact her if they were interested in being involved. More than 50 people reposted this video on their news feeds, with hundreds of referrals through the tagging of people’s names in the comments section and by personal messages via WhatsApp. The sheer density and strength of the deaf network made it possible for Erin to interview more than 40 deaf tourists from a range of countries and to observe, over 7 months, an average of one (single- or multiday) group or individual tour every week. Like Steve and Sanchayeeta, Erin also made use of snowball sampling, with participants introducing her to acquaintances who were traveling to Bali at a later date. People in deaf networks in Australia and the United Kingdom were particularly helpful with this because most of the deaf tourists in Bali were from Australia, and many were part of an interconnected network of BSL and Australian Sign Language (Auslan) signers stretching between the two countries.
While the use of existing contacts and attendance at deaf events in London helped Sanchayeeta and Steve locate places and participants, and Erin relied on Wahyu’s schedule and social media, Amandine had to use yet another strategy to identify key participants and places in her subproject on Kakuma Refugee Camp. She started with a single contact: Evans Burichani, a Kenyan deaf researcher, to whom she was introduced via email by Shane Gilchrist, a deaf man from Northern Ireland who had frequently visited Kenya. Evans introduced Amandine, also via email, to Anthony, a Kenyan deaf teacher in Kakuma Refugee Camp. Amandine and Anthony exchanged WhatsApp video messages before her arrival, and in Kakuma, Anthony became one of the key people who introduced Amandine to hearing contacts at, for example, the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), which runs the deaf units in primary schools. As a teacher for LWF, Anthony had built up a large network in the camp; with his support, Amandine visited various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and institutes to identify places where deaf refugees gathered. Those she met led her to other deaf people. The introductions by Anthony thus enabled her to engage in snowball sampling. Atem, another deaf teacher who was a refugee from South Sudan, became one of Amandine’s key informants. A leader among deaf people in the camp, he had good connections with deaf refugees and understood what she was looking for as a researcher.
One NGO, Handicap International, directed Amandine to certain deaf households in the camp, but otherwise she found it challenging to identify additional places where deaf people met. After about a month, she identified small groups of deaf people meeting each other on a regular basis in a shop owned by Halimo, a deaf Sudanese woman. This became a central location for her fieldwork.
Amandine repeatedly asked deaf camp inhabitants if there were larger gatherings of deaf people, such as at football [soccer] sessions, because she had read that deaf footballers gathered in Dadaab, another refugee complex in Kenya (Youngs, 2010). One day, she learned from Atem that LWF was organizing a football event for deaf people, so she went with Anthony and Atem to the football pitch. Nobody came and when Amandine asked Atem to show her the message from LWF, she learned that Anthony had himself organized this football event to please Amandine. Amandine’s quest to “find deaf spaces” thus potentially influenced patterns of gathering in the camp.
A recurring pattern in these three subprojects is that it took considerable time and effort to identify suitable sites of research in places where deaf spaces or events are not publicly advertised, take the shape of smaller informal gatherings, or occur sporadically. This was not a challenge in the professional mobility subproject conducted by Annelies. This multisited ethnography partly focused on events organized by international organizations and partly on places where deaf people study or work in international groups. The aim was to study IS in a variety of professional contexts established for sports, culture, education, religious outreach, advocacy, and research in both the Global North and Global South, and covering North–North, North–South, and South–South interactions. The main challenge in this subproject was to select a feasible yet diverse number of events and locations for the study. Mostly accompanied by a camera team and sometimes a research assistant, Annelies attended the following:
•Four conferences with a variety of language policies: the 8th Deaf Academics conference in Copenhagen (2017), the SIGN8 conference in Florianopolis (2018), the XVIII WFD Congress in Paris (2019), and the World Association of Sign Language Interpreters (WASLI) conference in Paris (2019)
•One course: Frontrunners, an annual 9-month course for international deaf youth in Denmark (2017–2018)
•One workplace: DOOR International in Nairobi, the headquarters of an international organization, where deaf people from primarily African countries translate the Bible into their sign languages (2019)
•Two sports events: the 18th Deaf Chess Olympiad in Manchester (2018) and the 19th Winter Deaflympics in Italy (2019)
•One cultural festival: Clin d’Oeil in Reims, France (2019)
Annelies thus did fieldwork in two “permanent” settings (DOOR International, Frontrunners), whereas the others emerged as deaf transnational spaces for a few days, connected to more permanent institutions (e.g., WFD). Whereas it was straightforward to select global events like the Deaflympics and the WFD congress, it was more difficult to find suitable spaces in the Global South. Annelies had heard about DOOR International in Nairobi from two American white deaf academic colleagues who had spent time there who informed her that international interactions in this venue were predominantly among deaf Africans. Plans to go to an Asian deaf youth camp and to an Asian deaf sports event both fell through at the last minute: The youth camp board in the Philippines did not give permission for filming, and the sports event was canceled due to political unrest in Hong Kong.
The need to build long-term enduring relationships with a few key participants was less acute for Annelies than for the other subprojects’ researchers. The nature of the settings meant that Annelies never engaged with the same participants for more than a few days in total. Instead, the pressure lay in making the best use of time during these brief visits and in ensuring that a nuanced picture of experiences with IS could emerge.
Annelies had various strategies for locating interviewees at the events she attended. At the Chess Olympiad, she was an entirely new face and did not bring a camera team, relying instead on introductions by Ian Carmichael, a Scottish deaf man and father of a colleague at Heriot-Watt University, who had recommended that she attend. At the other events, however, there were always several people she already knew. She knew the Frontrunners teachers from having given guest lectures there, and she had also worked with them on a book chapter (Kusters et al., 2015). Of the Brazilian organizers of SIGN8, one had studied with Annelies’s husband at Frontrunners in 2007 (and had come to their wedding), and others were those she had met before at conferences. At Clin d’Oeil, she recognized performers and audience members she had met at conferences, at Frontrunners, and in various contexts when living in Belgium, India, Germany, and the United Kingdom. At DOOR, Annelies recognized deaf people from India and Burundi whom she had met before. In each of the settings, Annelies took care to also talk with many people she did not know or to whom she had not been introduced, by observing them (e.g., when they gave presentations) and then approaching them, following the conventions for new introductions in these settings.
The ways that places and people in the different subprojects were identified demonstrate how central the concept of networks is for understanding deaf sociality (see Chapter 7). Some of us have been able to tap into our personal deaf networks, but all of us have also expanded our networks and tapped into other deaf people’s networks—on Facebook, through assistants, and by snowball sampling. Deaf ethnographers are reliant on successfully building contact with key participants, as there is typically a small range of places and people to choose from. There being only two deaf tourist guides in Bali, it was crucial for Erin that they agreed to participate in the project; the same was true for Amandine in Kakuma, where Anthony and Atem were among very few deaf leaders. These key informants, and in some instances also research assistants, directed us to situations, events, or people likely to be helpful in ethnographic fieldwork.
Informal and Formal Consent
In the first instance, potential participants typically give informal consent to the research in conversation with the researcher by agreeing to interact with the researcher and/or to be interviewed. The next step is to gain “informed consent,” which is a formal agreement between the researcher and the participant. MobileDeaf had a common template for procuring informed consent; however, the process necessarily differed between settings.5
A participant information sheet and informed consent form were created for all MobileDeaf subprojects. These forms were templates created as part of the ethics procedure agreed upon with the funder (the ERC) and could be edited to fit the methodologies used in the subprojects. On the forms, it was specified what types of data were to be gathered (e.g., interview data, video recordings, photographs) and how they would be used for dissemination of research findings (e.g., presentations, publications, ethnographic film). There were different levels of consent, ranging from full use to selected use of data and from full anonymization to nonmasking. Over the years of the project, the templates had to be revised several times when ethical regulations or fieldwork circumstances changed—for example, during the coronavirus pandemic, when Sanchayeeta took her ethnography online.
The language and the register of the consent forms conformed to strict ERC guidelines, making them inaccessible for many participants. We had to ensure that the consent procedures were appropriate for deaf people; this was informed by our previous experience and by other researchers who have considered informed consent with deaf participants (Dikyuva et al., 2012; Singleton et al., 2014; Young & Temple, 2014). Gaining informed consent for ethnographic fieldwork is particularly complicated and consists of more steps than gaining informed consent for an interview study (see Kusters, 2012). We prepared several solutions: having the form translated into a local language (Portuguese, for Annelies’s fieldwork in Brazil), creating a signed video translation (BSL, for Sanchayeeta’s fieldwork in London), and translating the form live to the participant while recording this process (all subprojects). Gaining informed consent was most challenging (and sometimes problematic) when working with people for whom participating in research was entirely new. It was difficult for some participants to understand the purpose of ethnography; for example, they assumed we were conducting research in order to improve services for migrants in London or to help refugees in Kenya be resettled.
It is not possible to ask consent of each individual person who is observed, interacted with, or captured on camera. As a rule, we asked for formal informed consent from people who participated in planned research activities, such as interviews and focus groups. The act of signing the form was often preceded by informal announcements and/or obtaining informal informed consent. For example, Amandine first participated informally in Kakuma Refugee Camp by meeting people and explaining about her research in conversation. During these interactions, Amandine was able to learn the basics of Kenyan Sign Language (KSL), a crucial component for ensuring consent, and to engage with deaf leaders Anthony and Atem, who gradually came to understand well what she wanted to do and could assist in explaining the project to others. Of the 80–100 deaf refugees Amandine met, she identified several people as potential key participants, and she organized a formal consent procedure as a public event. No filmed interviews took place before this.
Because most of Amandine’s participants had limited English literacy, the written English consent forms were not treated as standalone. Amandine explained her research objectives and the consent forms in KSL, and Anthony assisted by re-signing the forms’ contents in KSL, using signs, examples, and explanations that would be better understood by participants. After this, the forms were filled in, during which the participants were individually assisted by Amandine and by the deaf leaders in the camp who acted as gatekeepers. The whole process of asking consent was video recorded to evidence the procedure. Amandine suspected that some people did not fully understand the consent forms, even after explanations by Anthony and Atem, but they seemed to trust Amandine because of this mediation and they signed the forms.
In some subprojects, participants signed consent forms after interviews. Knowing what they had just shared with the researcher, they could specify on the consent form if the researcher could use “all” or “selections” of the interview content. In the latter case, the researcher was required to contact the participant to ask whether particular parts of their narrative could be used in writing or films.
We knew it was especially important to clarify issues of anonymity and how photos and video-recorded images were to be used. Could only the researcher see the footage? Could parts be shown in presentations? Could interview quotations be posted on the MobileDeaf website? Could video images be used for our films? Would we have to check each image with the participant before using it, or could we use anything? In Annelies’s research, only two of 145 video-recorded people did not want the interview recording to be used for the ethnographic films. However, quite a few people wanted Annelies to check with them before quoting them in the film or in writing, and a few specified which parts of the interview should not be used—for example, asking Annelies to leave out where they had talked negatively about ASL or Americans. In London, full anonymization was important for several participants, and many were reluctant to be filmed due to their vulnerable migration status; conversely, some Kakuma participants believed that being interviewed on film would help their resettlement process.
Researchers often have a better understanding of what happens to publications than their participants. Most participants understood that not anonymizing them would mean that they could be visible online and in print. However, not all participants used the internet extensively, especially Amandine’s refugee participants and some of Erin’s Balinese participants. It can be difficult to predict what impact naming someone will have. Even when a person is comfortable being named or visible at the point of the research, later they may regret having their personal stories, faces, and opinions being exposed in an ethnographic account or film. For example, several participants for the film Finding Spaces to Belong withdrew their consent after being interviewed. Also, deaf people who have been named in an ethnographic account of an exotified place can be easily looked up by journalists, researchers, or tourists in the future (see Chapter 6; Braithwaite, 2020). Pseudonymizing or anonymizing is not necessarily an easy solution because the identity of “a deaf migrant from country X living in city Y” can easily be surmised by an informed reader. This can be mitigated by leaving out details, but in doing so we also lose insights into context and intersectionality. Furthermore, many of our participants wanted their names to be used because they wanted their stories to be shared: Anonymizing people’s stories and roles in history means removing a key element of deaf emancipation processes (De Clerck & Lutalo-Kiingi, 2018). As a result, most personal names in this book are real names, but these are interspersed with pseudonyms. The ethnographer has to carefully consider when to name people and which aspects of their identities and stories to obscure, and we made our decisions about what to share and how on a case-by-case basis.
Participant Observation
In the field, the ethnographer aims to learn about settings and from people by conducting “participant observation”—that is, by participating in the setting and observing what happens around them. One moment, ethnographers may be in the background (e.g., at the back of a classroom); the next, they may participate more actively by chatting with people, asking questions, responding to their questions, and doing things with or alongside them. In our settings, “doing things with” or being “mobile with” (see Bissell, 2009) included eating and drinking together, taking a guided tour together, walking to school or work together, watching a sports competition together, and attending a conference together. Most of these were things that participants were already doing rather than activities planned by the ethnographer. However, participants also do things differently because of the ethnographer’s presence, such as guiding the ethnographer to various places, observing the ethnographer, and organizing gatherings for the ethnographer. Observing and participating teach an ethnographer about the field, its rules, and the people; the participants also learn about the researcher, including what they are seeking and how they work (Blommaert & Dong, 2020). At times, we blended in (e.g., as a tourist, conference attendee, or pubgoer), whereas in other situations we stuck out by virtue of our positionality or the nature of our activities as researchers.
Shifts between the extent of our observation versus participation enabled us to experience settings from various “outsider” and “insider” and “observer” and “participant” positions in the field. An ethnographer works systematically toward understanding certain themes within the setting. If the setting is new to them, they start by aiming to notice and observe “everything” to develop as broad and thorough an impression as possible. By systematically observing a broad range of situations or themes repeatedly and exploring them on different scales, from different angles, and from different people’s perspectives, a layered understanding of these phenomena will emerge. Small events are seen in larger contexts. Ethnography allows us “to see, in microscopic events, effects of macroscopic structures, phenomena and processes” (Blommaert & Dong, 2020, p. 18). Patterns in behavior will appear, and the ethnographer will increasingly zoom in on specific themes emerging from the setting. When conducting participant observation in a site that is already familiar, the researcher will aim to notice or discover aspects of the setting or theme of which they were previously unaware, and they will explore familiar phenomena from new angles and in more depth.
This learning process, laid down in extensive field notes, ultimately results in theoretical statements by way of an inductive analysis. Writing field notes is challenging: The researcher does not know in advance exactly what will be relevant later or which themes will emerge as crucial (Emerson et al., 2011). Field notes tell us “a story about an epistemic process,” which Blommaert and Dong (2020, p. 37; emphasis in original) explain as the way in which ethnographers process new information, interpret this information, and make connections between events happening at different times and in different places. The field notes are a record of the learning process and of how the fieldworkers’ gaze and understanding shift over time.
We recorded our observations, whether jottings (quick notes on the go) or extended field notes, on various platforms. Amandine always carried in her trouser pocket a small notebook to jot down ideas wherever they occurred or to note observations during conversations with deaf refugees. Steve would usually draw a visual map of the outline of the Deaf Club, pub, or event he visited and note the ethnicity of the people present (if known), as well as their gender and estimation of their age. Erin and Annelies found their smartphones useful for making quick notes on the move, both for writing and for adding photographs and video clips. When observing in a classroom or conference hall, a laptop or iPad was also used for jottings. Making jottings openly was a reminder for participants that we were conducting research. Where making notes was not possible or appropriate, we memorized details to later type up in extended field notes. We usually wrote our extended field notes in our first written language: English for Erin, Sanchayeeta, and Steve; French for Amandine; and Dutch for Annelies. In these field notes, we would detail our observations as well as what we could remember about each conversation, and we made decisions about what or whom to follow up with. We also included methodological notes and reflections on our positions in the field.
Participant observation often involves language learning, although the process of language learning, as well as researcher language proficiency, is often obscured in ethnographic accounts (Gibb et al., 2020). The amount of language learning required differed between our sites, ranging from learning a new sign language to a degree of fluency to learning “bits” of other sign languages. Generally, it is easier for deaf people to learn new sign languages than for hearing people to learn new spoken languages within a short time period. For us, sign language learning during research typically happened by way of interacting with people and picking up signs from them. When we were not yet fluent in a sign language, we included elements from other sign language(s) and relied on features such as fingerspelling in English and mouthings based on different spoken languages; we also relied on calibration strategies such as using a larger signing space, using highly transparent signs, and engaging in enactments (see Chapter 8 for a fuller exploration of such processes). This does not mean that communication in sign language always goes smoothly. Communicating can be challenging if the linguistic and cultural distance is very large. We will give examples of this below.
Our approaches to participant observation differed considerably between settings. Erin started her research by performing online data collection, following on social media several deaf travel influencers who were on months-long tours of different parts of the world. Observing these people’s content, the topics they chose to write or sign about, and the hashtags they used led to insights into what was important to deaf travelers and what differentiated deaf tourism from “regular” tourism. For example, as well as posting photos of the places they visited, many also posted about the deaf people they encountered, their experiences with languaging, and their views of the barriers faced by deaf people outside of Europe and North America.
At the beginning of the project, Erin hired Wahyu to guide her around Bali and offered him the role of a research assistant. He declined, preferring to focus on guiding, but he did allow Erin to accompany him on different tours for deaf tourists; she initially participated as a tourist but increasingly took on the role of observer, making jottings or short videos for expansion into field notes later. Erin often sat in the front seat of Wahyu’s car and asked him questions as he drove. Wahyu would then talk to Erin at length about different topics, such as his feelings about his relationship with his hearing wife’s family, who had helped him set up his business, and stories about his earlier life and employment.
In her first month of fieldwork, Erin took classes in BISINDO (Indonesian Sign Language) at the deaf school in Denpasar, partly to meet deaf leaders and researchers, but also because it was a way of acclimating to Bali. However, she did not use BISINDO very much during her fieldwork because most deaf people in Bali knew some ASL or IS. Erin also learned some Kata Kolok when she was in Bengkala, the “deaf village.” The tourists that Erin interviewed were mostly ASL or Auslan signers; Erin could understand Auslan because of similarities with BSL, which she had learned at Heriot-Watt University, where MobileDeaf was based. She used IS with tourists from Europe.
During the drive between sites, Erin would actively ask tourists questions about how they communicated with other people of different nationalities and why they chose to visit less “touristy” sites such as deaf schools. Erin found it easier to connect with deaf people from India, the United States, and Australia, whom she knew personally or through friends of friends. She found it harder to connect with Wahyu on a personal level, perhaps because of their classed, gendered, and racialized positionalities, but most likely because he was very busy with his work. Erin’s status as a white, deaf, female researcher from the United States certainly had an impact on the ways in which she was perceived, and there were some limitations on her ability to connect with Indonesian men. In the late 20th century, Bali emerged as a site of sex tourism for women; young Balinese male sex workers continue to be sought by Japanese, European, and Australian female tourists, and this may have influenced how Erin was perceived by some men in Bali.
In general, deaf tourists understood Erin’s role as a researcher; however, Wahyu did not seem to fully understand why Erin wanted to follow him around for several weeks. This type of confusion is typical in ethnography because people can understand the purpose of interviews more easily than participant observation. When Erin asked to join Wahyu on a tour of the Monkey Forest with a group of young men from Germany, he responded, “Again? Really? I have already taken you two times before. Are you okay with seeing the same place again and again?” Erin visited the same tourist spots in Bali many times with different tourist groups, and she spent a lot of time on the road in gridlock traffic. As a result, Erin often wrote her field notes in the car.
Erin also traveled without Wahyu. She visited Yogyakarta with deaf tourists to observe the phenomenon of “informal” guiding of deaf tourists by deaf people who live in the area (see Chapter 7). She also visited the “deaf village” Bengkala several times, observing on two occasions camera crews from Japan and Singapore who were there creating documentaries about the deaf villagers (Moriarty, in press; see also Chapter 6). The days Erin spent in Bengkala were an opportunity to observe the impact of tourism and research on dynamics within the village. In all these settings, Erin took notes on what she observed, including particular words or phrases that were used often and recurring themes such as concerns about sign language imperialism and “the deaf economy.”
After 5 months in the field, two white deaf cameramen from Belgium in their early 30s (Jorn) and late 20s (Jente) arrived for 6 weeks of filming for the MobileDeaf project’s ethnographic film. They went on tours with Wahyu and also joined a 10-day tour with a group of multiethnic deaf people in their 20s and 30s from Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This was organized by the company Travass, led by the other deaf guide working in Bali, Giovanni Mansilla. Erin and the cameramen constantly sought a balance between blending in as part of a tourist group and being a group apart (i.e., a team). They were also always looking for a balance between “insider” and “outsider” positions. As they were making an ethnographic film in which they did not participate themselves, they could not fully participate in the tourist groups they interacted with (this topic is also explored in Birthing a Genre). At the same time, they were part of the various tourist groups and the Travass trip, and paid the full fee for participating. The team spent time with the other tourists as tourists, without doing any filming; however, they also distanced themselves from the groups when filming, planning, and conducting interviews. Tourists took lots of group photos and sometimes took two group photos on the same occasion: one with the team included and one without.
Over time, Jorn’s role shifted. Erin felt that he had an ethnographer’s disposition and found that some tourists, particularly younger women, responded better to him. She asked him to take the lead in some fieldwork, using their positionalities strategically to ensure productive interviews. At first, Jorn was reluctant, saying that he was “just a cameraman” and jokingly using the Kata Kolok sign for “boss” when referring to Erin; over time, however, he began to see himself as a co-researcher.
Although Erin was able to blend in as a tourist at times, Amandine always stood out as an “outsider” in Kakuma Refugee Camp. For one thing, she was not allowed to stay with deaf refugees or live in the camp for safety reasons. Due to recurrent armed robberies, thefts, rapes, and killings, the Kenyan government stations policemen in the camp between 6 in the morning and 6 in the evening; after sunset, the camp is not guarded, and violence often recurs. Thus, every evening, Amandine had to return to the compound where she lived, a few minutes’ walk from Kakuma Refugee Camp. Transportation inside the camp was often difficult: The hot weather and distances of up to 15 kilometers made it arduous to navigate on foot, so Amandine traveled with teachers or staff from the NGOs in cars or by the popular taxi motorbike, called a bodaboda.
When Amandine visited places frequented by deaf people, such as the deaf units in primary schools, she would mostly observe without interrupting; when accompanying deaf camp inhabitants to various destinations or waiting in line with them, she would ask questions about their everyday activities, where deaf people lived in the area, and their communication strategies with deaf and hearing people in the camp. Amandine arrived at the camp with some knowledge of KSL because she had started picking it up in Nairobi during the few weeks spent waiting for her research permit. Her previous knowledge of ASL helped her to understand KSL because KSL has absorbed some ASL signs. ASL was also used in the camp. When Amandine and camp residents did not understand each other, they would fingerspell words in English, use gestures, or use ASL. Amandine found communication with educated deaf refugees easier because deaf people who had not been to school signed in a different way, using what they called “village signs” (see Chapters 3 and 8). Atem or Anthony would then translate into KSL for her.
Once Amandine had located Halimo’s shop, a place where deaf people gathered, she began to start her day there. Halimo would update Amandine on news regarding other deaf refugees, and Amandine would chat with the people who visited. Conversations varied in theme: courses taken by deaf refugees; questions of resettlement; and everyday news about fights, arguments, new relationships, and family problems. On evenings and weekends, Amandine would eat with Anthony at his compound in the camp, and deaf refugees would often join them. This is an example of how the presence of researchers themselves also creates or expands deaf spaces (see Kusters, 2012, for other examples). Indeed, it is impossible to study a place or event as if you are not there yourself (Blommaert & Dong, 2020).
Responses to deaf researchers’ race have been noted by white deaf people who do research in situations where the majority demographic is not white (Boland et al., 2015; Kusters, 2012) and where the researcher’s race was associated with a geographical location in which the researchers had not grown up (e.g., China in the case of Hou, 2017; America in the case of Kusters, 2012). The presence of a deaf white person was a curiosity in the camp, and deaf refugees were initially shocked to discover that Amandine was deaf because many of them expressed surprise that a white person could be disabled. When Amandine went to crowded places, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Protection Delivery Unit or a dancing session on the street with hearing Sudanese people, she was stared at for a long time. Amandine felt she could not observe deaf refugees’ everyday lives without having an obvious impact on the settings she was in because she could not blend in. Frequently, when visiting deaf people in the camp, hearing camp inhabitants would also come to watch her chat with deaf people. Sometimes, it became crowded and Amandine left. This was different from Erin’s experience in Bali, where tourism is a major industry and white visitors are not unusual; indeed, most (although not all) of Erin’s tourist participants were white.
Later in the fieldwork period, Amandine’s husband Adam, a deaf white man, came for a 3-week visit and accompanied her around the camp in all her interactions, visiting houses, the Protection Delivery Unit, the deaf units, and church. Adam could communicate with deaf refugees using IS mixed with ASL. Amandine observed that some male refugees (including some of her key participants) interacted with him differently than with her. During visits to their houses, the men shared more personal stories when Adam was present, showing childhood pictures, dancing outfits, and tribal flags. Some deaf men discussed marriage and dowry with Adam and talked with him privately (see Kusters, 2012, for a similar situation in Ghana). Amandine had similarly gendered conversations with deaf female refugees but rarely with deaf men. Anthony, the deaf Kenyan teacher, had often invited Amandine to his house alone; during Adam’s visit, he made more frequent invitations to both of them and also invited other deaf male refugees to join them. Back in the compound, Adam shared his observations and conversations with Amandine, enabling her to learn more about what kept male deaf refugees occupied.
There were additional implications regarding Amandine’s position as a white person. Kakuma Refugee Camp is managed by UNHCR, which has responsibility for providing legal protection and meeting people’s basic needs, such as shelter, food, water, sanitation, and medical care; it is also responsible for repatriation to people’s homelands or their resettlement outside the camp. Because UNHCR is managed mostly by white people, refugees tend to associate any white people they meet in the camp with UNHCR. Because Amandine is white, some refugees made strategic use of her white privilege, noticing that her presence gave them quicker access to certain spaces and that UNHCR agents were cooperative with her (see Chapter 10). Additionally, several deaf refugees retained the expectation that she could assist them, despite her reiterating that she had come to learn about their stories and could not directly influence resettlement processes. Presumably due to their assumptions about Amandine’s power to make changes in their lives, deaf refugees approached her to make complaints about their living conditions in the camp, including to report domestic abuse and conflicts with neighbors and regarding problems or confusion about registration with UNHCR. These issues are common in the camp but are exacerbated for deaf people (see Chapter 10), and the lack of access to bureaucratic processes, questions of immobility, and refugees’ hopes for the future became central themes in Amandine’s research.
Amandine also gathered data from organizations. When she first arrived, she was introduced to representatives from the Refugee Affairs Secretariat, various humanitarian nonprofits, NGOs, and key compounds and institutions around the camp. This was with the support of a BSL interpreter, who was with her during her first 2 weeks in Kakuma. Later, through informal conversations in written English with hearing staff working in the LWF office, Amandine gathered data about the management of deaf educational programs. In this way, Amandine puzzled together pieces of the everyday lives of deaf refugees in the camp and the role that different (deaf and nondeaf) institutions played in their lives.
Whereas Erin’s research featured institutions (deaf schools) as (volun)tourist destinations, in Amandine’s research, deaf units in schools and deaf vocational courses were havens for deaf refugees, in stark contrast with other institutions in the camp where they experienced a lack of access. Additionally, homes were important places for research in the camp, in particular Halimo’s home. This was different in the London-based subproject, where most people were not comfortable receiving researchers in their homes. This limited the opportunities for participant observation within domestic spaces; instead, as outlined previously, institutions and public deaf spaces were central research sites in this subproject.
For Steve, communication with deaf migrants generally took place in BSL, but there also were instances of BSL being mixed with IS or the interviewee’s sign language (e.g., from Bulgaria, Lithuania, Romania). There were some occasions where Steve found it very difficult to communicate, especially with migrants who used a lot of signs from their country of origin. Sanchayeeta used BSL and ISL with her participants, and her knowledge of Filipino Sign Language helped her to communicate with migrants who used ASL. Sanchayeeta noted that mouthing in English helped to bridge different language backgrounds.
Many times, Steve and Sanchayeeta were asked if they wanted to get involved in the activities of those they observed: to participate in religious settings, to play games, and to contribute to monetary investment schemes. As with Amandine, it was also common for Steve and Sanchayeeta to be asked for help, often with immigration advice or advocacy support, but also for emotional support (sometimes, in times of acute crisis). This indicates that the deaf spaces visited by Steve and Sanchayeeta remain vital places of deaf support, where knowledge and assistance of all kinds are exchanged (see Chapters 4 and 7).
In the early stages of her involvement, Sanchayeeta’s participant observation was mostly conducted alongside Steve, and sometimes Jorn. On some occasions, she had her son with her (age around 10 during that time), and sometimes her 2-year-old daughter in the later stages. Participants saw Sanchayeeta as a mother, and she felt that they were particularly open with her because of this. However, with hindsight, some may also have been cautious about what they said or did because Sanchayeeta’s son could understand some signs. In her solo research into the experience of female deaf marriage migrants, she had fewer opportunities to do participant observation, due in part to the pandemic and also to her own pregnancy and those of two of her five participants; this, and their subsequent maternity periods, limited their mobilities within the city. Sanchayeeta’s methodology consisted mostly of interviews conducted online, and each participant was interviewed multiple times (see next section).
Sanchayeeta felt able to connect with her participants through her positionality as a brown deaf woman who is part of a minority community in London with similar foodways and other cultural markers (e.g., Indian gestures), and who has visited India and met Indian deaf people known to some of the participants. However, she also experienced being an outsider due to not having grown up in India and not being part of the extensive Indian networks of deaf people. Unlike her participants, Sanchayeeta is a born Londoner (not an immigrant herself) and is not constrained by her family’s cultural values (she is not required to get married or expected to follow Indian cultural norms). Her researcher positionality was further complicated by friendships—those between participants and those developing between herself and participants. As participants kept aspects of their lives hidden from each other, Sanchayeeta, who had detailed knowledge of their lives through the interviews, had to be careful about what she revealed to whom socially. Due to their long-term involvement in the project and the personal information they shared, participants expected to learn personal details about Sanchayeeta in return. They also asked advice on pregnancy, postbirth, and breastfeeding issues, as well as for BSL-to-English translations of documents (see Chapter 8 for an example) and support with job applications and studying. At times, Sanchayeeta experienced these requests as an invasion of her personal space and time, and she chose not to respond to nonurgent text messages and to decline some invitations. One participant came to rely on her as her main source of study support, so Sanchayeeta encouraged her to ask her teachers and classmates as well.
Because Sanchayeeta went on maternity leave in the middle of her doctoral research, the study extended over 4 years. Maintaining a years-long relationship with a very small number of participants led to long-term perspectives on migration and on the impacts of changes in the women’s lives (see Chapter 10). Yet, it was challenging to maintain the relationships. When some of Sanchayeeta’s participants started to show reluctance to undertake further interviews, she realized that more informal in-person interactions were needed. However, in the middle of her research, she had moved 1.5 hours from London, which limited her opportunities to attend events in the city. When the country started to open up after the pandemic lockdowns, Sanchayeeta met with her five participants individually for coffee or in their homes; she also complemented her interview-based study by engaging in a limited amount of participant observation by attending meals and parties with them and other Indian deaf migrants and British South Asian deaf people.
Like Sanchayeeta, Annelies made heavy use of interviews; she also employed various ratios of observation to participation in her different field sites. In most of the conference settings, Annelies was attending as a presenter. In this regard, Annelies was, like Steve and Sanchayeeta, doing “ethnography at home,” because her research took place at events that were already familiar to her. In some field sites where Annelies participated with a camera team, she did an especially high number of interviews, and there were fewer opportunities to observe without cameras and to have informal chats with attendees. In contrast, at the Chess Olympiad in Manchester, she took the position of observer and had solely informal conversations with others about their experiences. Her attendance at this event, during which she did not do any interviews or filming, was beneficial when approaching the delegations of chess players for interviews at the Deaflympics 1.5 years later because she recognized several people and they recognized her. People, themes, and sites being linked in circuitous ways is typical for multisited ethnography (Wulff, 2002).
In the different sites, Annelies mostly knew in advance what she wanted to cover; this was necessary given the short duration of the events. At the 2019 WFD congress, she focused on the institution of IS interpreting as experienced by interpreters and participants; at the DOOR institution in Kenya, she studied the ideologies attached to deaf multilingual interactions outside of Europe. Research in some settings informed others; the settings were nodes in translocal networks (see Chapter 7), which were connected via institutional histories. In advance of the 2019 Winter Deaflympics, for example, Annelies had done interviews at the WFD congress and SIGN8 conference with people also immersed in the sports world, who compared dynamics in the sports and other international deaf networks. This helped to anticipate some of the issues that would come up at the Winter Deaflympics.
In certain settings, working with a research assistant was crucial. The 2019 Winter Deaflympics in north Italy took place over 12 days in five different locations, with more than a thousand attendees. Annelies was not familiar with the sports context and sports networks, and therefore preemptively employed a research assistant: Dawn Jani Birley, a former Deaflympics athlete with a wide network in the deaf sports world and who was an expert in IS. Dawn provided Annelies with context and helped her identify and approach participants. At the WFD congress, a 4-day event attended by thousands of people, Annelies worked with her husband Sujit (with whom she had worked on ethnographic projects before). While she spent most of her time interviewing, he carried out observations, video recording field notes several times a day with a focus on participants’ experiences of accessing (or not accessing) the conference. The four different deaf camera operators with whom Annelies worked over 2.5 years of filming also shared their observations with her, which she fed into her field notes. Additionally, participant observation happened within the research team. Both the deaf cameramen at the Winter Deaflympics and the research assistant Dawn were (former) top sportspeople who talked about their own experiences in the deaf sports world. This led to additional insights for Annelies. (Note: see Birthing a Genre for brief interviews with assistants and cameramen.)
In terms of positionality and connecting with research participants, Annelies experienced this study as profoundly different from her previous research in Suriname, Ghana, and India. Professional mobility is an activity in which she has often engaged, and she could blend in at many of the spaces she visited. Sometimes, however, her positionality as researcher (rather than journalist, supporter, or tourist) had to be clarified. At WFD and Clin d’Oeil, a press badge helped her to access some spaces as observer (e.g., backstage) and to approach unfamiliar people, but it also created some confusion about her role. Annelies did participant observation in unfamiliar spaces, too, such as at DOOR International in Kenya and the Winter Deaflympics, where the learning curve for understanding what was going on was steep. However, at the Deaflympics, she had both a press badge and Dawn’s support, and those at the DOOR translation center were welcoming, highly skilled in communicating internationally, and happy to talk about their experiences. Annelies’s knowledge of BSL, ISL, VGT, and basic ASL helped when communicating, especially in situations where not everyone communicated in IS. Although Annelies did not have the time to build up lasting research relationships with her participants, she found that people were almost always cooperative when she approached them for conversations or interviews, which is probably typical behavior in the context of professional mobility. Many of the deaf people she encountered were already used to being interviewed, although occasionally Annelies could not successfully engage with people who had very different linguistic backgrounds from hers and with whom she had little knowledge in common, such as with some athletes at the Deaflympics and some performers at Clin d’Oeil.
We have noted our respective positionalities in various sections previously, including our race, nationality, and citizenship; previous experience of living and working; language knowledges; and age and stage of life. We have also noted that, whether planned or unplanned, working together with a person of the opposite gender led to the emergence of additional and different data: Erin with Jorn the cameraman, Steve with Sanchayeeta as his research assistant, and Amandine with Adam when he visited her. We want to explicitly comment on race again. For Erin, Annelies, Steve, and Amandine (as well as Jorn and Adam), our whiteness had an obvious impact on the type of data and people to which we had access. No one has said to our faces “I can’t talk about this with a white person,” but it would be disingenuous to take this to mean that our whiteness had no influence. This was explicit for Amandine, who was openly seen as a representative of UNHCR; it was unquestionably also in play when Annelies, Erin, and Steve were working with people of color and people from ethnic minorities, who tended to give no or minimal details about their experiences of racism, microaggressions, and white fragility (see Eddo-Lodge, 2017). This was a weakness in the initial project design and something that we will reflect on in the design of future projects. Sanchayeeta and Sujit were much more successful in discussing these themes with participants and contributed crucial insights; additionally, the screening of Double Discrimination, at which Rinkoo Barpaga gave a presentation, successfully prompted discussions of racism. Sanchayeeta and Sujit also experienced some barriers of their own. In the London subproject, Sanchayeeta found it easier to connect with deaf people from ethnic minorities than with white deaf Eastern European migrant women. Sujit connected with a large number of participants from the Global South at the WFD congress but, as a man, sometimes found that Muslim women were reluctant to speak to him. Religion also played a role in Amandine’s study because most of her participants were religious, and Amandine did not want her own Christianity to be a barrier to engagement with Muslim deaf people. She avoided talking about religion with most participants; however, their shared Christianity helped her connect with some of the key participants. In these latter examples, race, gender, and religion all impacted how we connected (or not) with our participants, demonstrating the benefits of a team approach for studies of this nature.
There are also less-discussed elements of our positionalities that impacted how we approached research. For example, all of us identify as queer; although we all had straight-passing privileges at the time of research due to being in relationships with a person of the opposite sex, our sexual orientations and past experiences helped us empathize with some of our participants’ testimony. Experiences of ill health and disability also inform our experiences of doing participant observation (and, indeed, the writing process). Challenges in relation to states of the bodymind are often omitted from discussions of participant observation; it seems more common to consider factors such as gender and race. However, participant observation is a difficult, demanding, intensive, and immersive research approach. Like many other (deaf) researchers, each of us has dealt with the impact of various experiences of, and changes to, our states of bodymind, including “invisible” disabilities, neurodivergence, and health challenges such as depression, pregnancy and lactation, and advanced cancer, resulting in overstimulation, exhaustion, insomnia, anxiety, high stress levels, and difficult emotions. To give some examples, Steve has had to be absent from the MobileDeaf project for stretches of time to manage a chronic and complex mental health diagnosis. Erin, an introvert, found participant observation over multiple-day group tours, including room-sharing, to be highly draining. During her fieldwork, Amandine had to deal with symptoms of her undiagnosed cancer, which made fieldwork particularly challenging. Amandine was only able to complete the planned first stage of her fieldwork because her diagnosis and treatment (and later, the pandemic and her subsequent pregnancy and maternity leave) meant she was unable to return to the field. Annelies juggled short but intensive periods of fieldwork, managing the team, and other high-stress professional demands with having young children, one of whom was still breastfeeding during the first year of fieldwork. Additionally, conducting long-term fieldwork alone, far from home (or at home during a pandemic), can be isolating. Amandine slept and ate in a compound with only hearing people, where she felt excluded. Sanchayeeta started her fieldwork while pregnant, behind a computer screen at her parents’ home in the midst of a pandemic; following maternity leave, she continued to work at home with a baby and minimal support, affecting her mental well-being.
Often, these experiences had to be suppressed in the field, and we typically did not disclose our states of bodymind to participants. “Hiding” mental ill health, masking neurodivergence, and repressing emotions takes a toll on the researcher, the impact extending beyond the field. Amandine experienced vicarious trauma from the stories of abuses, rapes, and deaths that deaf people in the camp told her in vivid visual detail. Atem, one of her key participants, passed away during the writing of this book, and Yanto, one of Erin’s key participants in Bali, died just after she completed her film. These deaths were deeply upsetting and made it difficult to engage with certain data sets. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Erin also received many desperate messages from people in Bali, a country almost completely dependent on tourism, asking for funds because they were on the brink of starvation. Although we saw the “problems” caused by states of our bodyminds as being “to overcome” or “to circumvent,” and we tried to minimize the impact on our work, several of us have had to pull out of planned research activities, and three of us have dealt with months-long disruptions.
Participant observation is the core of ethnography; however, there is a common misconception that ethnographic research is interviewing. Even though conducting interviews does not make research ethnographic, many ethnographies do include interviews of various types (Blommaert & Dong, 2020), and this was the case in each of the MobileDeaf subprojects. Ethnographic interviews do not take the form of interrogations but are conversations intended to explore topics; in these, the researcher tries to avoid behaving like an interviewer because participants will then behave like interviewees (Blommaert & Dong, 2020). In contrast, semistructured interviews are based on a pre-created list of questions but are responsive to the interviewee: The questions may be reordered or omitted entirely, allowing the interviewer the flexibility to follow up on points made by the interviewee (Bryman, 2012). Although we shared common research questions, we did not create a shared list of interview questions; all of us constructed our own, and the way we conducted ethnographic and semistructured interviews was specific to the subprojects’ settings. We interviewed people where it suited them, often within or close to the settings where we did participant observation. This resulted in an interesting range of interview locations, including a plane, a football pitch, a hospital, auditoriums, mosques and churches, cafés and restaurants, cars, classrooms, the beach, conference rooms, a UN office, a boat, and participants’ homes. Some of our interviews were with people who were our friends or colleagues prior to the research, especially in the projects on professional mobility and labor and marriage migration. The prior familiarity in “acquaintance interviews” (Roiha & Iikkanen, 2022) can lead to more honest and in-depth responses as researchers build on existing rapport and shared prior knowledge. Some of us also made use of other interview formats, such as focus groups and the use of visual data (e.g., drawings, language portraits) to elicit narratives (see, e.g., Kusters & De Meulder, 2019); we do not discuss these here.
Each subproject had a different ratio of interviews to participant observation. Annelies’s multisited study was heavily based on interviews and focus groups, whereas Amandine’s study was more heavily based on participant observation, although she interviewed six deaf people toward the end of her fieldwork. Erin did interviews with people whom she had traveled alongside and observed, but she also interviewed tourists whom she had not observed at all; conversely, some tourists she observed did not have time to be interviewed. Steve mostly interviewed people he had met during participant observation, some of them with Sanchayeeta. Due to the pandemic, Sanchayeeta’s individual study was based primarily on interviewing. Below, we explore the implications of these different balances and how different interviewing styles were used in different contexts.
In the London-based migration subproject, Steve interviewed 12 people by himself; Steve and Sanchayeeta interviewed nine together; Sanchayeeta interviewed five by herself, and eight with Jorn for an ethnographic film on migration to London. The interviewees came from a wide range of countries, including Brazil, Ghana, Burundi, Romania, Somalia, Italy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Lebanon, Canada, Czech Republic, Guatemala, and Norway. The interviewed people’s backgrounds varied regarding race and ethnicity, class, disability, employment status, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. Although the initial focus of the project was on labor migration, the focus broadened over time. Some participants had initially arrived in the United Kingdom as refugees, others as a child with their parents, others after marrying a person in and/or from the United Kingdom, and yet others for work or study opportunities.
The main challenge in relation to interviewing, as highlighted in the participant observation section, was finding research participants who agreed to be interviewed on camera. Several people agreed initially and then did not respond to messages to arrange the interview; conversely, some people who were not deaf migrants wanted to be interviewed. These challenges are typical when arranging semistructured interviews with people who are otherwise unknown or new to the researcher. Of the 12 interviews done by Steve, the majority (seven) came about through contacts of Sanchayeeta or Annelies, reiterating the importance of networks. Five interviews were done with people met at City Lit. Seven were female, five were male, and all but one (a white female from North America) were from an ethnic or minority background. Steve and Sanchayeeta continued to meet, see, or communicate with the majority of interviewees after the interviews, whether socially, formally, or via social media and text messaging.
Steve’s semistructured interviews were fairly formal, beginning with the informed consent procedure and then drawing on the same pool of questions for each interviewee (e.g., “When you first arrived in the United Kingdom, how did you communicate with deaf and hearing people?”). They lasted approximately 1 hour, with all except one recorded on video camera. All interviews were held one-to-one, with the exception of two interviews involving two participants. Steve found it easier to build rapport with interviewees from a similar ex-mainstream background to his own and who had knowledge of BSL. Although communication was mostly through BSL, in several cases a mixture of BSL and IS was used. Communication in interviews leaned more toward BSL than the communication observed during participant observation, which was more varied depending on the backgrounds of those conversing.
In the interviews that Steve and Sanchayeeta did together, Steve was strongly focused on class and labor issues, whereas Sanchayeeta was more concerned with gender and feminism; she would ask additional questions after Steve. Sanchayeeta knew some of the interviewees’ backgrounds well and was able to use this knowledge to invite them to share experiences. In the interviews that Sanchayeeta and Jorn did together for the ethnographic film Finding Spaces to Belong, Sanchayeeta led, and Jorn added questions in relation to themes emerging from his work on the other ethnographic films.
Interviews for Finding Spaces to Belong took place in 2019, with recruitment of participants beginning 2 months after Sanchayeeta had begun her doctorate. Of her participants, two were contacts from previous employments, two she had met at the “888 Club” film screening, two were recommendations from other contacts, and one was from City Lit. The film had to be put on hold until 2023 due to the coronavirus pandemic; resuming it allowed for the documentation of shifts in participants’ reflections on their sense of belonging and also their signing styles over the intervening years, which was particularly acute for those who had only recently arrived in London in 2019. The film illustrates that belonging is an ongoing and dynamic process, shifting over time through ongoing experiences, social interactions, and language acquisition; the enforced interruption of the pandemic, therefore, not only changed the framing of the film but also gave greater insights into the subject. To accommodate the new framing, and to ensure that the film did not exceed 1 hour in length, it was decided to reduce the number of participants to four.
For Sanchayeeta’s one-to-one interviews with her five Indian female newlywed participants, she used a rather different interview process: a collaborative (re)construction of the participants’ reflective narratives of their life trajectories and journeys. Each person was interviewed three times, and each interview was between 45 minutes and 2 hours long. The first interview for each participant was semistructured, with questions such as “How has married life changed you?”; the following interviews were conversations built around material the participants provided on Sanchayeeta’s request—photos of their everyday lives, video diaries, and self-portraits (collages and drawings about their lives in India and the United Kingdom). Sanchayeeta began these interviews with a recap narrative, reconstructing key moments of the participant’s life using these different materials and also drawing on the semistructured interview and the participant’s social media accounts. Seeing their narrative summarized by Sanchayeeta helped the participants to reflect on how they had presented themselves. Follow-up questions expanded these narratives. When a participant struggled to answer specific questions about their experience, Sanchayeeta prompted interviewees to respond to previously gathered data. For example, one participant was struggling with Sanchayeeta’s question about factors that led her to marry and move to the United Kingdom, focusing only on her compatibility with her husband. Sanchayeeta shared what she knew about the participant’s life at the time, which reminded the participant that her mother had also encouraged her to marry, due to being singularly responsible for her daughter. Although this approach risks spoon-feeding responses to participants, Sanchayeeta found that it gave participants space to reflect when they struggled with telling some parts of their life story. Sanchayeeta also shared clips of the early interviews with them, prompting reflections on changes—both in their signing and in their outlook on life.
This interview process also prompted Sanchayeeta to reflect on her own experience of growing up with Indian immigrant parents, and her own Indian heritage. The research gave her a sense of connection to her ancestral homeland, which is the lens through which she understands and presents the data. Sometimes, Sanchayeeta shared these aspects of her own experience with the participants, although mostly during informal interactions rather than the interview itself.
Whereas Steve and Sanchayeeta’s interviews were exploratory and provide the bulk of their subproject’s data included in this book, Amandine’s interviews were undertaken with the aim of recording the stories that she had already been told during her everyday conversations with deaf refugees. Amandine interviewed seven Sudanese and Somali deaf people between ages 20 and 40, three men and four women, with whom she had already had many informal interactions. Having already built rapport extensively with her participants before asking to interview them, Amandine did not face the same challenges that Steve had in London with recruiting participants and building trust.
Amandine interviewed most people in their houses, and the interviews lasted between 30 and 60 minutes. She generally started the interview by asking deaf people about their journey to Kakuma Refugee Camp, moving on to their daily lives and how they communicated with other deaf and hearing people. This question-and-answer format is recognizably similar to that employed in classrooms and official interviews, and the perceived authority of the person conducting the interview, in addition to factors such as race and ethnicity, may have a profound impact on the interviewees (Blommaert & Dong, 2020). On reflection, Amandine realized that some of her questions resembled those asked by UNHCR upon the refugees’ arrival at the camp to determine their need for support, leading her to wonder whether this reinforced the misconceptions of deaf people as to her role in the camp.
In general, deaf refugees said they felt honored to be interviewed and that they had a desire for their stories to be recorded—although this may have been in hope of resettlement. In some interviews, other people were present (this was unplanned) and observed the interview, which influenced the responses in terms of depth given and the themes highlighted. Despite their apparent keenness to be interviewed, some responses were very short, and Amandine felt the same need as Sanchayeeta to expand on questions by giving examples. However, the response then frequently contained the example she had just provided: When Amandine asked which sign languages they used in the camp, the interviewee responded with examples she had given (KSL and ASL). Additionally, some of the responses to interview questions contradicted what Amandine had seen during her fieldwork, for example, deaf people stating in the interview that they distrusted hearing people and had no hearing friends, whereas Amandine had observed them communicating and laughing with hearing inhabitants of the camp (see Chapter 9). Through these interviews, she received new insights into how deaf refugees preferred to represent their lives. Ultimately, however, she found the interviews of limited use compared to what she had learned through participant observation. As she was unable to return to the field to do additional, more in-depth interviews, most of the data on Kakuma Refugee Camp in this book are based on participant observation.
In Erin’s study, interviews and participant observation were balanced in terms of importance. To collect data on tourist perspectives, Erin interviewed more than 50 people from a wide range of backgrounds (e.g., Asian Americans, black Americans, white Australians, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, queer people, nonsigning deaf people, signing deaf people) who identified as solo travelers, “voluntourists” (tourists doing volunteer work), backpackers, honeymooners, or long-term travelers. She conducted group interviews with people who were traveling together—for example, a couple from Australia and a group of friends from France. Erin also interviewed some experienced deaf travelers who were active on social media, such as those in the Facebook group Solo Deaf Travel. She interviewed some people together with the filmmakers, these interviews being potential material for the film #deaftravel. Some people made repeated visits to Bali, and Erin was able to interview them twice: once on her own, early in the project, and then again with Jorn for the film.
After the initial struggle to locate potential interviewees, Erin did not experience much reluctance to be interviewed, possibly because tourists are typically in positions of privilege and a context of leisure compared to, for example, the more precarious situation of migrants on temporary visas in the United Kingdom. She asked questions about whether they sought out deaf people when traveling, about their motivations for travel, and about how they communicated with different people. She also explored local perspectives on tourism, with local interviewees including the two deaf tourist guides working in Bali, deaf people in Bengkala, deaf people working in schools, and deaf community members; additionally, she interviewed some hearing people about the history of tourism in Bengkala.
In Bengkala, some of the deaf interviewees did not want their data used because it was sensitive information about power dynamics in the village. She conducted some interviews with the assistance of a person who knew Kata Kolok because she was not fluent enough then to ask detailed questions; later, she had picked up enough Kata Kolok to conduct interviews unaided. She also drew on interviewees’ family photos to help with communication.
In each of the field sites in the professional mobility project, Annelies focused her interviews on a few key themes in relation to participation and use of IS. There were more than 2 years between the first and last case study, and during that period Annelies’s research foci gradually shifted away from gathering perspectives on the nature of IS and toward the specific dynamics and ideologies of using IS in various contexts. Each of Annelies’s previous ethnographies had been based in one city or one village, very different from conducting interviews in a multisited project due both to the type of setting and the themes; in many ways, it was easier because most of the interviewees already had metalinguistic and/or professional knowledge that helped them engage with the questions and give precise answers. This was in contrast to Amandine’s and Sanchayeeta’s experiences; they had to work harder to build rapport during interviews. Similarly, Erin found it easier to interview tourists than to interview deaf people in Bengkala due to shared frames of reference.
Not everyone understood the aim of Annelies’s interviews, however. At the Winter Deaflympics, interviewing athletes proved more difficult than interviewing coaches or technical directors. Athletes often said they didn’t know IS or deferred to their coaches or captains, who acted as gatekeepers and spokespersons. This is reminiscent of Steve’s experience in London with deaf people who felt they were not the “right” person to be interviewed. Some individuals approached by Annelies did not want to be interviewed but were happy to have an informal conversation instead—and, as in Amandine’s case, sometimes these informal interactions (laid down in field notes) worked better than interviews.
In some settings, interviewees reacted with surprise when Annelies asked questions about language use. Interviewees at the Winter Deaflympics expected to be interviewed about sports competitions, and deaf performers at Clin d’Oeil expected to be interviewed about themes in their creative work. This expectation was probably exacerbated by the team wearing press badges. There is a parallel here with Amandine’s interviewees’ expectations about the nature of the interviews she was conducting, based on their previous experiences and their perception of the interviewer.
In total, Annelies undertook 145 interviews over a period of 2.5 years. This may seem a very large number, but the duration of the interviews was wildly variable, ranging from 2 to 90 minutes. Some interviews explored only one theme—for example, a conference presenter’s experience of giving a presentation in IS. Other, longer interviews went deeper and explored several themes with the same person over time. Annelies interviewed Frontrunners students and teachers twice, at the beginning and then at the end of the year. In the second interview, the interviewees rewatched their first interviews and ethnographic recordings, which led to reflections on how their signing and their positions in international deaf spaces had changed (see Chapter 5). As in Sanchayeeta’s follow-up interviews with her participants (both in her doctoral study and in the ethnographic film), these second interviews led to an understanding of processes of language learning over several months (see Chapter 8). At some of the professional events, it was challenging to plan interviews around people’s participation in the program, a challenge also experienced by Erin with participants who were on holiday; this contrasts with the projects on migration, where people were interviewed within their everyday routines. About a third of Annelies’s interviews (approximately 50) were with people she had met through her previous mobilities and her migration trajectory, which helped to plan a large number of interviews during brief fieldwork stints. She did not, however, wish to fully rely on previously established networks because there is a danger of solely engaging with and reinforcing “echo chambers.”
Annelies wanted to include a wide range of different experiences of international deaf communication and professional mobility, and she explicitly sought out (and asked assistants to seek out) people whose experiences are underrepresented or for whom IS was new or challenging. Interviewees from underrepresented minorities (e.g., deaf people with additional disabilities, female leaders in deaf sports) did not always mention being underrepresented, perhaps considering it irrelevant to the interview or unsafe to talk about with Annelies and/or on camera. Although deafblind interviewees generally would reference being deafblind at some point during the interview, neurodivergence, chronic illness, or sexual orientation were rarely mentioned.
Almost all Annelies’s interviews were conducted in IS. Although several people declared that their IS was not good enough (despite having already had conversations in IS with Annelies), Annelies assured them that she understood their signing. There were a few cases in which the interviewee did not use IS; for example, in Kenya, most would sign a mixture of KSL and ASL. In many of the interviews, Annelies was not the only person asking questions; as such, the interviews became a team effort, similar to those in the labor migration project and in the tourism filmmaking process. For example, Jorn would typically add one or more questions at the end, keeping in mind the film as a whole. Research assistants interviewed participants together with Annelies, sometimes asking questions before Annelies but mostly afterward—and, on a few occasions, instead of Annelies (with Annelies observing). The benefit of this was that, when one fieldworker was asking questions, the other(s) had time to think of additional questions. Additionally, on approximately five occasions, a deaf interpreter or broker supported the interview in an impromptu way, typically when interviewing deafblind people, deafdisabled people, and deaf people who did not know IS.
In sum, we employed a range of interviewing styles and approaches. We interviewed people we knew from outside the research setting or whom we had met through participant observation; we also conducted interviews with people with whom this was our first meaningful interaction. Interviews lead to highly quotable data, and this book is thus interspersed with quotations in which deaf people narrate their experiences. A key issue with using interview data is how it is presented: In this book, it is inserted in translated form.
Translations
Translation of sign language content into written languages is a challenging process due to the differences between linguistic structures and the modality shift (Young & Temple, 2014). Signers make frequent use of simultaneous structures, whereas written languages are largely linear; decisions regarding the ordering of some narratives are, therefore, complicated. Additionally, the crucial and often subtle use of nonmanual features in sign languages can be difficult to lay down in words. In any translation, underlying cultural meanings can get lost; signed idioms and the underlying cultural meanings of particular ways of signing are particularly hard to convert into written languages (Ladd, 2003). A lot of information is thus lost in translation. It can be argued that using written translations of video-recorded signed interviews as the basis for analysis is too problematic to continue as standard practice in Deaf Studies research, and there is an increasing number of ways of annotating signed interviews, such as adding tags to video fragments in ELAN (a video data annotation program). Qualitative data analysis programs that have traditionally worked with text are also increasingly allowing smoother working with video.
Analyzing video data directly rather than analyzing written translations allows the researcher to stay close to the primary data. However, all of us have found it quicker to recall and skim written data, especially when in large volumes. For that reason, we have opted to work with translations of interviews in our analysis. Some translations were done by us; others were outsourced to research assistants and translators. We treated translations as complementary to, rather than for use instead of, the video data, and we developed strategies for staying close to the original footage, such as coding (annotating) the transcript immediately after viewing the video while the signing was still fresh in our minds, noting sign choices that were relevant or interesting to our study. Sometimes, when we were uncertain about a translated quotation, we would get in touch with our interviewees to cross-check the meaning. We have made direct, video-recorded quotations available on blogs, in presentations, and in our ethnographic films. In many places in this book, we have therefore linked directly to time codes in the ethnographic films where (parts of) original quotations can be viewed. (Note that the subtitles are often shortened versions of the original translations and therefore do not exactly match the quotations in this book.) We also include photographs in our work when discussing particular signs (e.g., in Chapter 8). Thus, even when working with written translations, there are multiple ways to avoid losing touch with the original signing in the analysis and dissemination processes.
Where translations were done by members of the MobileDeaf team, we have struggled with our fluency in English in comparison to other languages. In addition, we are not trained as translators ourselves, and the interviews were the result of intercultural exchanges. Sanchayeeta felt uneasy about her use of informal British English to translate Indian informal gestural phrases. Some types of signing were especially difficult to translate, including some uses of IS, home sign, translanguaging, signing without mouthings, and idioms. Larger cultural distance between interviewees and researchers also leads to challenges with translation. In Amandine’s case, she had only been immersed for a few months in the specific sign languages used by the people she interviewed in Kakuma Refugee Camp. The interviews conducted at the end of the fieldwork consisted mostly of questions that she had already asked in informal conversations, and she drew on that background knowledge when working on the translations. Still, it was sometimes hard to translate when deaf refugees used very little mouthing to accompany their signs. Amandine also struggled to get in touch with her participants online, so opportunities to check translations were limited. Conversely, Sanchayeeta was able to contact the participants for clarifications; in that process, the participants reflected on their responses, and Sanchayeeta could ask further informal questions to bring in extra dimensions to their narratives.
Where translations were outsourced, translators received context. When Annelies sent in the batch of interviews done in Kenya, she made a video of KSL signs that frequently occurred in the interviews, gave context about the setting, created a spreadsheet with background information about the interviewees, and sent a set of notes on recurring themes. Naturally, mistakes in translations were common because translators were not present at the interviews themselves. It was imperative for the translations of outsourced interviews to be checked and fine-tuned by the interviewer.
Conflicts of interest can arise when outsourcing translations. Annelies’s study was about IS, and the company to which she outsourced most translations was the main company providing IS interpreting and translation. The company did not want to tell Annelies who did each translation, and different data sets went to different translators. This was deeply uncomfortable, due to the very specific (and sometimes sensitive) content of her data. Most of the data were about IS politics and thus close to home for translators working from IS. Although translators are subject to confidentiality agreements, they cannot “un-know” what they have translated and can benefit from it. Annelies was even approached by one of the translators for a film they wanted to make, inspired by the interviews.
Analysis and Writing
We analyzed our data in different ways. Steve and Sanchayeeta started by going through the full interview transcripts multiple times, and then wrote summaries and noted recurrent themes alongside each transcript. Most of us, but not all, used computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (Atlas.ti and Nvivo, depending on individual preference) to annotate the data with codes that we created as needed (see right side of Figure 2.1). Coding gives names or labels to components that seem to have a potential theoretical significance or that are salient within the social world of those being studied (Bryman, 2012). Often, data excerpts (such as single sentences or a paragraph) were coded with multiple codes.
When coding, we knew roughly what types of themes would come up in the data because these had emerged through our fieldwork. Erin’s codes were often words or descriptions that the participants used themselves, such as the recurring phrase “see how they live”—frequently uttered by tourists when asked why they were interested in visiting deaf schools or the deaf village. These codes serve as the basis for the generation and development of theory. When coding and closely observing data, new insights occur, new details are spotted, and new categories are created.
In the writing process, data excerpts connected to codes were retrieved and reviewed to identify patterns and exceptions to these patterns. This inductive method, following the principles of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), enabled us to analyze patterns from the bottom up to build theory, both within our individual chapters in this book and in the shared chapters. Within and between each subproject, we identified overlaps between these key themes and parallels and divergences in our findings. An important setting for identifying these overlaps was our regular reading groups in which we discussed our shared theoretical framework and considered illustrative examples and anecdotes from fieldwork. We also undertook other activities to find connections between our data sets, including creating a shared set of hashtags in an online application for which we each had an account. Whereas the codes used in our individual analysis were specific to our subprojects (e.g., for Amandine: “village signs,” “Sudan signs,” “Somali signs”), the hashtags were intended to be broad (“networks,” “class,” “aspirations,” “time”) to engender connections as we shared data. There did tend to be an overemphasis on sharing excerpts from interviews, as opposed to sharing field notes, because quotations are more immediately accessible. However, they can also be decontextualized, whereas our notes from participant observation made it possible to write in more general and summarizing terms and to give specific examples of what we had observed. We have thus taken care to ensure that the presentation of observation data is not drowned out by interview data. The shared themes informed the structure of this book, which has been further simplified and streamlined during the writing process. We held regular online writing sessions and three in-person writing weeks to maintain cohesion.
Figure 2.1. Annotations in Atlas.ti of Annelies’ interviews at DOOR International.
The differences in our respective methodologies are reflected in our writing. The different types of interviewing we employed and the different balances between interviews and observations have enabled us to compile a rich combination of in-depth, multilayered portraits of a few deaf individuals across multiple chapters, alongside examples from people who are mentioned only once or twice in the book. We share very specific situation descriptions, as well as broad generalizations, based on our repeated observations in a range of settings. Our approach extends beyond the boundaries of traditional ethnography, incorporating elements of autoethnography. Autoethnography allows researchers to explore their own experiences through self-reflection, connecting these personal narratives to broader social, cultural, and political contexts. Auto-ethnography essentially bypasses one of the interpretative stages that research data usually undergo. It emphasizes the researchers’ understanding of their personal experiences instead of their interpretations of others’ experiences. Recognizing its importance, a growing number of deaf scholars have begun incorporating autoethnographic elements into their work, intending to amplify more deaf “voices” within academia (see Kusters, 2022, for references).
Our utilization of autoethnography serves three central functions. First, as mentioned previously, our initial research questions have been partly shaped by our prior experiences, some documented in field notes, others drawn from memory. Second, autoethnography forms an essential component of our ethnographic process as part of our research within our field sites. Third, during the duration of the MobileDeaf project, we have applied autoethnography to different aspects of our internationally mobile lives (outside of research practice), leading to the inclusion of personal anecdotes in this book.
The narratives that we present are thus derived from a diverse array of sources. Some details stem from our planned research, whereas others have sprung from unexpected experiences. The various elements are all integral to our research and to isolate planned from unplanned fieldwork and formally observed data from the impressions formed over the courses of our lives would be somewhat arbitrary given our own involvement in deaf international networks and our positionalities as mobile deaf people. As such, we do not too rigorously differentiate in the following chapters between data gathered as part of planned ethnographic fieldwork and incidental data drawn from our lived experiences. Instead, each chapter should be understood as an illustrative mosaic of different international mobilities assembled from multiple methodological and experiential approaches, which we feel captures the nuanced dynamics of living mobile deaf lives.
Our states of bodymind have also impacted our writing processes, often slowing it down. We gradually came to the insight that “crip time,” the use and experience of time as a disabled person (Samuels, 2017), has impacted us in productive ways. Sanchayeeta collected data before and then after her 9-month maternity leave, and through this was able to take a longer-term perspective on her participants’ lives. The disruption to the production of her planned ethnographic film due to the pandemic gave space and time for the story to “mature” and different perspectives to come to the fore. Steve returned to the MobileDeaf project to work on the book reenergized from having spent a year working part time for a small local deaf organization. Amandine’s interruption of study due to advanced stage cancer gave her the distance needed to process her vicarious trauma. We all noted that letting data, drafts for this book, and film scripts sit for months—even years—led to additional and new insights when we returned to them. These are examples of what is known as slow scholarship, or slow science. Crip time can, intentionally or unintentionally, permit slow scholarship, which we see as a strength of the MobileDeaf project. We are fortunate that the project duration (5 years) and the deadline extension we received (18 months) made it possible for us to stretch the process over 6.5 years, during which the project—and we ourselves—matured.
Labels in Writing
A challenge for this book is how to inform the reader about the backgrounds of the various participants, many of whom are only mentioned once. Space limits us from including lengthy introductions for each person. We are conscious that the visibility of diverse people, especially minoritized groups, and the affirmation of their perspectives, is crucial to providing a full picture. Yet, this is not a straightforward process: There is a fine line between visibility and representation on the one hand and tokenism and essentialism on the other. In addition, in writing, the categories to describe people are “frozen”; in film, explicit labels can be more easily avoided, but although certain features such as skin color are inescapably visible (and subject to the interpretation of the viewer), other positionalities are entirely invisible unless explicitly commented on.
A key identifier in our project on international mobility was participants’ nationalities. Nationality can give some clues as to race and ethnicity when considering majority demographics in countries, but solely mentioning nationality also erases race in, for example, the case of black Americans or Turkish Belgians. We considered informing readers of each participants’ race or ethnicity, nationality, and gender throughout, for example, by writing “X, a black woman from the United Kingdom, said …” but there are problems with this approach. Regarding gender, there is a danger of misgendering people. Racial markers such as “black” or “Black” are cultural constructs and have different meanings and connotations in different national contexts (Bonnett, 2022). A complication with national labeling is the use of combined labels of national and cultural heritage (e.g., Iranian German), the use of which varies widely and is not limited to those who have moved in their own lifetime.
In an international project focusing on mobility, it is crucial to note that labels for race, ethnicity, and nationality are highly relative and dependent on the settings in which the labeling happens. Certain frameworks for labeling race (such as labeling all nonwhite people as BIPOC) do not necessarily resonate broadly or translate well across national and cultural contexts. Similarly, one’s skin color and tone can be labeled differently in different places. Examples include a person who identified as a “light-skinned” person in Ghana but as “black” in the United Kingdom, and a person from Portugal who was labeled as “white” in Europe but seen as a “person of color” in the United States. Skin color is not always the key identifier: The type of hair or the shape of the eyes or nose are often referred to when marking racial and ethnic differences, as when people in Indonesia call white tourists “big-nosed people” (see #deaftravel). We also note that people from many countries in the Global South identify by the ethnic group they are part of within that country; in contrast, at the WFD congress or after having moved to London, people who look similar in the eyes of “outsiders” are often grouped together as “Indians,” “Africans,” or “Arabs.” However, these terms are profound overgeneralizations: To take just one example, members of the Indian diaspora may come from various parts of the Indian subcontinent, practice various religions, have different caste backgrounds, and so on. In the context of international mobility, there is a tendency for “Indian” or “British Indian” to be used by non-Indians as generalizing categories, whereas people from India make more fine-grained distinctions.
There are other labels that can be crucial to people’s identity, such as religion and sexual identity. People may choose not to foreground crucial aspects of their identities where they feel that it is not safe or relevant to do so, especially on film. Although our interviewees have a wide variety of backgrounds and claim various identities, these identities were not always disclosed in the interviews. The foregrounded labels varied between contexts. People may see religion (e.g., Muslim, Christian) as a key identifier in some contexts but not in others. Some deaf queer professionals traveling to Muslim-majority countries refrained from mentioning their queer identity; in contrast, a deaf queer person who had moved to the United Kingdom, and had come out there, openly asserted this new label.
Another set of labels that we grappled with was whether to label our participants as “migrants,” “refugees,” “tourists,” and so on. In labeling people by the type of mobility they were engaged in, we were trying to explore patterns in distinct types of mobilities (see Chapter 1). However, the people themselves may not have necessarily identified with these labels. Some “tourists,” for example, prefer to be called “travelers” (see Chapter 6). Labels were especially challenging in the labor and marriage migration subproject because many participants did not identify as a “migrant.” For example, when Sanchayeeta approached one participant from Sierra Leone to inquire whether he was interested in participating in the study, he contended that he was not a migrant because he had obtained British citizenship and had been living in London for a long while. In other examples, European migrants typically did not use that term for themselves. However, because we wanted to highlight patterns in sociality in relation to types of mobility, we found it necessary to use these labels in this study.
For most participants, we did not know what labels each of them would use for themselves in the context of this book, including their gender pronouns. This led to conundrums during the writing process over how to ethically make diversity—and thus intersectionality—visible without knowing which labels people would use themselves, especially when these identities were not explicitly discussed during interviews. Another pitfall is that labeling people may (inadvertently) give the impression of essentialism (see Chapter 5). Consequently, we decided to mention participants’ nations of origin as a minimum because in most cases it was clear which national labels participants used for themselves, and we have often added gender and race or ethnicity as well. We ask the reader to take into account the above-mentioned pitfalls with these identifiers. Other labels were added where the participant had explicitly identified them or made them relevant.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have explored the different strategies we used to do ethnography, both individually and as a team of deaf researchers. We have shown that even in a project with overarching research questions and a broadly shared methodology, our approaches were necessarily different. By outlining our solutions in this chapter, we hope to inspire future ethnographers looking for strategies for their research settings. A feature that all the projects had in common is that we often participated in deaf-only international spaces, going from groups of deaf tourists to deaf-only courses, to deaf gatherings in homes. Our being mobile deaf signers was thus a prerequisite for accessing many of these spaces. Other aspects of our positionalities shaped our research as profoundly as our being deaf, however. In some contexts, factors such as our race, gender, and education stood out especially sharply, but in each of the contexts, these factors shaped how we engaged with our participants.
Doing deaf ethnography around the core theme of international deaf mobilities meant making use of deaf networks, asking questions that are grounded in deaf experiences letting themes emerge from settings where “being a deaf signer” was always one of the shared features or shared interests. The implications of this approach are that other meaningful axes of identification were, inevitably, positioned as “additional to deaf” (e.g., deaf and queer, deaf and black), both in our positionalities and in the positionalities of our participants. This approach can give the impression that “deafness” is the first or most important axis of identification for participants in our study, which is a common problem in Deaf Studies research and one that we were not able to circumvent. Doing deaf ethnography was thus a double-edged sword. Through having deafness in common with our participants and as core identifier in the project we were able to put deaf–hearing differences to the side, and deaf–deaf differences could come much more sharply to the fore.
1. https://vimeo.com/857426224
2. A manual system of eight handshapes in four positions near the mouth, which clarifies the lip-patterns of the speech.
3. https://vimeo.com/854367099
4. https://www.bslzone.co.uk/watch/zoom-focus-2014-double-discrimination
5. In some locations, a first step is obtaining a research permit. Amandine had to apply for two different research permits before being allowed to undertake fieldwork in the camp; for these, she had to wait in Nairobi for weeks. Erin had to obtain a permit in Indonesia as well, a process that can take 6 months or more and that requires sponsorship from an Indonesian counterpart—a challenging relationship to develop for a deaf researcher because of communication access barriers.