7

Translocal Networks and Nodes

Erin Moriarty, Annelies Kusters, Steven Emery, Amandine le Maire, and Sanchayeeta Iyer

International deaf mobilities shape and are shaped by networks. Deaf networks are complex interconnected webs that expand and contract as deaf people move through physical and virtual spaces. Indeed, we cannot talk about deaf mobilities by only using static and exclusive concepts like “the deaf community,” community being a term that is associated with stability, coherence, long-lasting ties, and common histories (Wittel, 2001). Deaf people rarely live as spatially coherent, closed social groups: Deaf communities are multiple, overlapping, and shifting (see Chapter 9). The notion of interlocking networks offers us a more fluid and process-oriented framework for understanding the ways in which diverse deaf people and spaces are dynamically interconnected (Heap, 2003).

Networks are typically thought of as a set of nodes and the ties between them (see Figure 7.1). “Nodes” can be either persons or places; in this chapter, we focus on both. “Ties” between nodes are formal or informal, horizontal or hierarchical relationships, existing between people, between places, and between people and places. Ties between people in networks can be strong or weak; people may be known to others only by name and/or face, or they may have more intimate relationships (Glick Schiller & Fouron, 1999; Lubbers et al., 2018). Weak ties often function as bridges between clusters of nodes (areas of networks with a higher density of nodes), enabling people to reach different network clusters and expand their networks (Granovetter, 1983). People are thus not stationary nodes; furthermore, a person can be a point of convergence for various networks as they make introductions or connect other people. Deaf networks alter in composition as people engage in networking and as network clusters link up with other network clusters.

Places can also be nodes: locations “where the mobility flows of passengers, goods, materials, information and so on intersect” (Adey, 2006, pp. 75–76). Deaf clubs, deaf-owned businesses, and deaf schools are examples of places that are nodes in deaf networks—that is, places where connections are made. Nodes can also be smaller and more private. For example, some deaf people’s houses are “hubs of sociality” (see Heap, 2006), such as the house of Halimo, a deaf Somalian woman in Kakuma Refugee Camp. Her home was frequented by deaf camp inhabitants from various countries. Halimo provided her guests with food and was a contact point for information and support (see Chapter 3).

Some place-nodes are mostly frequented by deaf people who live in the vicinity; international visitors may then enter these local networks and spaces, such as Amandine participating in the deaf space of Halimo’s house. Other nodes can exist as “bubbles,” disconnected from local spaces and people, such as a deaf tour group in Bali that included no local participants and was guided by a tour guide from another area. Yet others are a confluence, such as the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) congress, which is organized in cooperation with a local organizing committee (see Chapter 5 for more on host countries).

Figure 7.1. Model of a network showing ties between place-nodes and people-nodes.

Deaf networks facilitate international deaf mobilities. As we show in this chapter, deaf networks are used for gathering information, finding accommodation, asking for support, gaining sponsorship, and finding guides, other tourists, or potential clients—and for acquiring various forms of capital. When deaf people (e.g., tourists, researchers, migrants) go to a new country, they often seek out deaf schools, deaf clubs, deaf organizations, or other landmarks on the deaf landscape as a way of meeting other deaf people with similar backgrounds or interests and tapping into local community knowledge. Some of these place-nodes resonate as “known” places where other deaf people can be found. For migrants in London, nodes in deaf networks are sources of information and language learning. However, many deaf place-nodes are also precarious and at risk of closing down, or they exist in temporary, ephemeral ways. As we show in this chapter, this affects where deaf newcomers can go to meet other deaf people in the host country.

The reverse is true, too. Some place-nodes have become part of widespread deaf tourist imaginaries, and thus they receive high numbers of visitors. For example, Bengkala, a “deaf village” in Bali (see Chapter 6), and Adamorobe, a “deaf village” in Ghana (Kusters, 2015), are often visited by deaf and hearing tourists, researchers, missionaries, nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers, and so on. Gallaudet University is another well-known node where different types of mobilities intersect: It attracts faculty and students, as well as researchers, identity-seekers, and tourists (De Clerck, 2007). We call the mental map consisting of these nodes the “glocal deaf circuit” (Moriarty Harrelson, 2015; see Chapter 6).

International deaf mobilities can also be planned to expand deaf networks and thus facilitate exchanges of knowledge and other resources. For example, deaf club leaders in Indonesia, such as members of Deaf Art Community (Dacjogja) in Yogyakarta, and the Bali Deaf Community, Bali, participated in an American/Indonesian Deaf Youth Leadership Exchange, for which they traveled to the United States and networked with a deaf lawyer, doctor, professional athlete, and White House staff member (U.S. Embassy Jakarta, 2016).

Networks are thus not static entities consisting of sustained ties, but they are changeable. The strength of these ties also can change over time, becoming stronger or weaker. Networks are changeable not only in the sense of expansion but also in the sense of lost and severed ties. Crucially, the continuation and/or expansion of networks relies on relational efforts: “One agent always relies on the other agent to maintain the network connection” (Schapendonk, 2015, p. 811). Social ties in networks are thus interdependent. In other words, social capital in the Bourdieusian sense (see Chapter 1) resides in networks (or fields) that are actively maintained, rather than in individuals. In other words, a network only functions if it is “intermittently ‘activated’ through occasioned co-presence” (Larsen & Urry, 2008, p. 93). Schapendonk (2015) therefore emphasizes that people engage in networking (as a verb), referring to the work people do to create and maintain networks. A person’s “networking capacity” depends on their individual skills, as well as on the power dynamics between individuals and on the efforts of other individuals with whom they connect (Schapendonk, 2015). To network effectively, individuals need access to relevant documents (e.g., visas, qualifications), communication technology, accommodation, transport, movement capacities, and the spaces where people meet, as well as technical, cognitive, and social skills; that is, network capital. Network capital is “the capacity to engender and sustain social relations with individuals who are not necessarily proximate, which generates emotional, financial and practical benefit” (Larsen & Urry, 2008, p. 93); it enables people to produce social capital, and social capital can stretch across long geographical distances if there is also network capital. In Kakuma Refugee Camp, for example, deaf residents of the camp meet with aid workers in the hope of growing their networks so that they can “fly away”; however, because deaf refugees are in a vulnerable position, many of these networking efforts will be in vain.

Different types of mobilities necessitate different types of network capital. For example, a tourist traveling on a budget may rely on social media networks to find accommodation, whereas a professional who travels to an event may have been funded by their employer or the organizer. Network capital has a spiraling character: As Elliott and Urry (2010) put it, “[t]he greater the scale of network capital, and, hence, the greater the networking that is made possible, the more that access to such capital is necessary in order to participate within such a ‘networked society’” (p. 61).

Complementing Deaf Studies approaches that use a “community” lens, the networks perspective directs focus on the active and maintained ties between people, and it acknowledges that ties can be weak or strong. By using the “networks” lens, it also becomes obvious that ties between deaf people can span different borders and scales. Network clusters can be national when they stay within national boundaries, but there typically are not neat divisions between local, national, transnational, or global networks. A person may participate in networks that connect them to people in other regions or countries without being mobile across international borders themselves (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004). For example, some deaf inhabitants of the “deaf village” of Bengkala (see Chapter 6) continue to sustain connections with deaf and hearing people overseas who have taken an interest in the village and its sign language, even if these villagers never travel outside Bali themselves.

Marxist geographer David Harvey developed the concept of time–space compression to describe the ways in which contemporary forms of economic organization (e.g., late capitalism) have sped up the circulation of capital (Harvey, 1991). This concept can be applied to the expansion of networks over short amounts of time. In deaf networks, the concept of time–space compression is expressed by the common deaf refrain upon meeting another deaf person and discovering connections in the form of shared acquaintances: “It is a small world!” The “small world” phenomenon refers to the experience of discovering that two individuals anywhere in the world may be connected by a limited number of links (Watts, 1999). The refrain is so prevalent that it became the title of an edited volume of Deaf Studies scholarship relating to international deaf spaces and encounters (see Friedner & Kusters, 2015a). In this chapter, we show that not only people but also places are connected in this “small world” phenomenon. However, it must also be remembered that time–space compression is an ethnocentric concept, and that it is “a western, colonizer’s view” that time–space compression has happened in equal ways across diverse places (Massey, 1994, p. 147). In Chapters 9 and 10, we show that certain places and individuals are better networked (and more mobile) than others.

Places are where ties between nodes are established, where (mega-)events happen, and where people meet. Therefore, people moving through deaf networks often have shared mental maps. Mental maps are maps that reside in individuals’ or groups’ minds, which correlate to the physical world and lay down perceptions of the geographical world (Götz & Holmén, 2018). Mental maps contain shared geographical knowledge linked to physical places. They are grids of place-nodes embedded in the mind. Often, a known deaf space becomes a marker for spatializing people and relationships: that is, people and the relationships between them are imagined in spatial ways and are associated with specific places—for example, a particular deaf person’s house (Heap, 2006; Kusters, 2015). These maps can exist on the most local level, such as deaf people in Kakuma Refugee Camp locating some other deaf people’s homes (Chapter 3), or researchers mapping London deaf spaces (Chapter 4). On a global scale, many people involved in deaf sports have a shared knowledge of the locations where the previous few editions of the Deaflympics have been organized. Caxias do Sul, Samsun, Sofia, and Tapei are connected in this way, having hosted the 24th, 23rd, 22nd, and 21st editions of the quadrennial Summer Deaflympics, respectively; many people who have some knowledge of the Deaflympics have automatically memorialized the sign names of these cities (which are otherwise less well-known internationally), and use them as short-hands to evoke collective memories of each specific time, place, and context.

These mental maps are thus a means of organizing collective experiences, community memories, and stories. Sometimes, events and networks are memorialized in new signs that emerge within a specific context. One such example is the sign ROME that emerged during the 19th Summer Deaflympics in Italy in 2001; it means “chaos” (Figure 7.2), which is how the event was experienced by many deaf attendees and participants (see also Breivik et al., 2002). This sign thus captures and evokes the collective memory of a chaotic and disorganized experience. Places can also be associated with individual people, such as in the case of Thiruvananthapuram, a city in south India; one sign for the city, a three-fingered sign on the neck (Figure 7.3), is based on the sign name of a deaf leader who lived there. Signs thus come to act as relics of collective knowledge or memories. Deaf knowledges and histories, implicit and explicit, travel and/or are anchored in the form of signs for places as they relate to people and experiences. Knowing the “right” sign for a specific place or event is a way of demonstrating “deaf knowledge” and/or social and economic capital (Moriarty, 2020a).

Figure 7.2. ROME.

Figure 7.3. THIRUVANANTHAPURAM.

To emphasize these connections between places, we foreground the fact that networks are translocal, connecting people and places across borders, and that mobilities depend on, and create, translocal networks (Greiner, 2011) (see Figure 1.2, in Chapter 1). The translocality concept is used to describe “phenomena involving mobility, migration, circulation and spatial interconnectedness not necessarily limited to national boundaries” (Greiner & Sakdapolrak 2013, p. 373). By talking about “translocal networks,” we approach networks as multiscalar, that is, as existing on various scales and in various places simultaneously. Translocality focuses on both mobility and place, building on previous work done by scholars of transnationalism to focus more on the importance of local dynamics in specific locations such as homes, neighborhoods, refugee camps, and international conferences. Networks are “the overlapping and contested material, cultural and political flows and circuits that bind different places together through differentiated relations of power” (Featherstone et al., 2007, p. 386). In other words, the translocality concept is used to emphasize ties between place-nodes across the world and to investigate transnationalism as place-based. What happens in one place has an impact on other places when ties between places and people solidify, such as the streams of visitors from Australia and the Netherlands to the previously mentioned village in Bali. Networks are embedded within places; interactions within networks occur in situ and therefore are influenced by, and may influence, places’ histories, cultures, laws, political frameworks, and so on. The contextualization of networks in the places where they manifest is thus crucial to their study (Lubbers et al., 2018).

Attending to the specific histories and contexts of various mobilities allows us to understand the dynamics that shape people’s individual mobilities and life trajectories, as well as the nature of the networks they build and engage in as shaped by race and ethnicity, gender, ability, class, and so on. Below, we use the life story of Andrew J. Foster as an illustration of the ways in which networks unspool across time and space, at different scales, and with enduring effects. The example of Foster also demonstrates the importance of understanding the specific contexts of the places in which networks and nodes are formed—in this case, the mid-20th century, in both the United States (with its established educational routes for deaf people, but concurrent institutional racism) and the African continent (with its then-limited number of deaf schools and its designation as a key destination for missionary and charity work from the Global North; see Figure 7.4).

Andrew Foster was a late-deafened black person, born in the Deep South of the United States during the Great Depression and the segregation era. He attended the Alabama School for Colored Deaf, where he received an education up to the sixth grade, the maximum level allowed to African Americans under the Jim Crow laws. In common with many other African Americans of this era, he moved north seeking better educational opportunities; this trend was known as the Second Great Migration (Agboola, 2014), and it shows how mobility can be related to barriers caused by racial discrimination. Foster continued to face institutional racism in the North, and he was rejected from Gallaudet University several times due to being black. Eventually admitted in 1951, in 1954 he became the first black deaf person to graduate with a bachelor of arts degree (in education) from Gallaudet, and he went on to complete two master’s degrees, one in special education and one in Christian missions (Moore & Panara, 1996).

Having learned that there were very few deaf schools in Africa, Foster was inspired to bring education to—and to evangelize—deaf people in Africa (Moore & Panara, 1996). He moved to Ghana in 1957, and from there, he started his migratory journey through Africa (Amoako, 2019; Runnels, 2017), establishing a total of 32 schools for deaf students across 13 African countries between 1957 and 1987. Foster engaged in outreach to locate students for the new schools, personally seeking out deaf children who could be sent to school (Oteng, 1988). During Annelies’s fieldwork in Adamorobe village, Ghana, older deaf people shared stories about Foster’s missionary activities in the village and his collecting deaf village children to go to school—not without resistance from their families and the village chief (Kusters, 2015). Foster also established numerous deaf churches, and he founded the Christian Mission of the Deaf to use as a base for fundraising for this work, spending a lot of time on fundraising tours throughout the United States (Ndurumo, 2003).

Figure 7.4. Andrew Foster’s network.

Foster, then, is an example of a node that then went on to establish place-nodes—and, indeed, other people as nodes—by personally training and mentoring deaf teachers and leaders in many African countries (Moore & Panara, 1996). Seth Tetteh-Ocloo, a deaf Ghanaian, came to Gallaudet from the Ghana Mission School for the Deaf, established by Andrew Foster (Aina, 2015); he went on to earn a master’s degree in education and doctorates in both educational psychology and rehabilitation. Having returned to Ghana to work for the Ministry of Social Welfare, Tetteh-Ocloo founded Ghana’s second school for the deaf, another deaf place-node. Another illustration of the impact and expansion of Foster’s network is Ezekiel Sambo, from Nigeria, who met Foster during elementary school and returned to Ghana after graduating from Gallaudet in 1970 to set up the Plateau State School for the Deaf in Nigeria, which has since sent more students to Gallaudet to continue their education (Aina, 2015).

Foster’s network was evidently translocal: his mobility within the United States, his international mobility, his local mobility within African countries (between schools, churches, and villages), and the reverberations of his activities found in the actions of other deaf leading figures have thus connected places in various ways. His mobility led, directly or indirectly, to new ties between people, to the international mobility of other people, and to the flow of money between countries. The networks he built through his deaf education and missionary projects and his fundraising efforts exemplify how ideas and resources travel between places: ideas (about missionary work and deaf development through education) and resources (such as funding from donors who supported Foster’s missionary work) traveled from Gallaudet to Nigeria and then onward to Fiji in Oceania through the new deaf development projects undertaken by the leaders whom Foster trained. In this case, Matthew Adedeji traveled from Nigeria to Fiji in 1996 to do volunteer work and “give something back to the Deaf community there” (Aina, 2015, p. 134). In an example of the reproduction of ideas and deaf development approaches, Aina (2015) describes the ways in which Foster’s faith-based work inspired similar approaches in Fiji, including using personal networks to find deaf children in rural areas and to encourage their parents to send them to school (these strategies have also been used by NGOs in Cambodia; see Moriarty Harrelson, 2017a). On a larger scale, South–South cooperation between deaf people and organizations also led to the identification of future deaf leaders in Fiji by the Nigerian deaf volunteers, resulting in Fiji’s participation in the 20th Summer Deaflympics in Australia in 2005 (Aina, 2015).

Andrew Foster’s life story and legacy is thus an illustration of how networks operate at different scales, creating new nodes and connecting people, places, and events across multiple countries and continents. It also illustrates the role that international deaf events play in deaf networks. For example, Foster met his deaf German wife, Berta, at the III World Congress of the Deaf (which became the WFD congress) in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1959; as two nodes, they were “tied,” and their transcontinental networks became linked. Furthermore, it was at the XIV WFD congress in Canada in 2003 that Matthew Adedeji and Wale Alade (a man from England who Adedeji met through their shared efforts to establish deaf education in Fiji) approached deaf sports leadership to advocate for the inclusion of Fiji in the 2005 Deaflympics (Aina, 2015). It is at these large-scale events that many deaf people become a part of international networks, make new connections, enable others to connect, and direct the trajectories of resources such as funding and expertise.

The examples we have given in connection with Foster’s life story exemplify how deaf networks involve affective entanglements, the deep feelings of connection and/or fracture that both drive and emerge from encounters between people, languages, and spaces. Just as affective entanglements shape the formations of deaf networks, they also sustain the circulation of ideas, resources, and knowledge among deaf people. They are found in the sentiments expressed by deaf missionaries or tourists when prompted to explain why they choose to visit deaf schools or sponsor deaf children in other countries: “I want to see how they live,” for example, and “I am not a wealthy man, but I have knowledge and expertise that I can offer at the school” (see #deaftravel: Deaf tourism in Bali). Many of these sentiments are tied with ideas and moral values that flow through networks, such as the idea that deaf people with privileges have a “responsibility” to engage in deaf development. Ideologies and resources travel—here, to locations in the Global South through the travel of “experts” (e.g., sign language linguists, deaf activists, deaf professionals, deaf consultants), as exemplified in the example of Foster and his former students (see Cooper, 2015; Friedner & Kusters, 2014; Moriarty Harrelson, 2015).

Lastly, although this chapter mostly focuses on in-person networking, we acknowledge that networking is profoundly entangled with and affected by social media. Mobile deaf people have developed different networking strategies to meet people within a country, including but not limited to the use of hashtags on Instagram, like #DeafTravel and #DeafWorld; crowdsourcing contacts in Facebook groups; turning up at a particular pub on publicized “deaf nights”; and gravitating toward a café or coffee shop that has developed online recognition as a business where deaf spaces have the potential to be produced between local deaf workers and tourists, such as the signing Starbucks in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, or The Bakery Cafe in Kathmandu, Nepal, with its deaf waitstaff (Hoffmann-Dilloway, 2016). In our research methodology, we used the same strategies to identify deaf spaces (see Chapter 2). People also use social media to locate and connect with other deaf travelers and hosts with similar interests and similar backgrounds (see Chapter 10).

In this chapter, we unpack the previously mentioned ideas in relation to deaf networks. We start with a focus on place-nodes: traditional nodes such as deaf schools and clubs, but also pubs and organizations, and how they do or do not function as central place-nodes within international deaf mobilities. We make a case for moving on from discussions about the “death” of permanent deaf place-nodes, and instead we focus on the vibrancy of the networks, and the flexible spaces that have taken the place of permanent deaf place-nodes. We then move to egocentric networks—that is, networks of individuals that span several countries—and explore how individuals tie into network clusters on various scales. The last part of the chapter focuses on international deaf events as confluences of deaf networks.

Institutions as Nodes

Place-nodes like deaf schools and deaf clubs—and to some extent also deaf churches and workplaces—are the traditional backbone of deaf communities. These nodes have long been destinations for internationally mobile deaf people, whether teachers, tourists, migrants, or refugees. For example, within and beyond the British Empire, schools in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada existed within a web of interconnections along which deaf professionals have traveled as teachers, job-seekers, and school founders (Cleall, 2015). The travels of deaf white men from the United States and Europe who had the social and economic capital to move internationally have been documented and circulated. Some of them published their travel notes (e.g., Gaillard, 1917/2002), which were then analyzed by historians (e.g., Cleall, 2015; Murray, 2007).

The deaf white male international travelers whose journeys were documented were often literate, sometimes in several languages, and able to access information about the location of deaf schools and clubs in print. For example, Murray (2007, p. 101) mentions a “directory for deaf-mutes” published in Germany in 1898, containing an overview of deaf clubs in Germany, Austria, and the United States, as well as deaf schools in Germany. This deaf “mental map”—a precursor of the Internet and hashtags on social media—became a way for deaf people to tie into local network clusters (as in Figure 7.4). Through their visits to deaf clubs and schools in Europe, deaf travelers made contact with “local” deaf people who then acted as “guides,” socializing with them, passing on information, and helping them to find employment. Networks were thus expanded in a snowballing effect, by which connections were made through mutual acquaintances. By way of their specific and privileged positionalities and their high network capital, these people “could navigate a preexisting web of interconnectedness across transnational space” (Murray 2007, p. 102).

It is significant that deaf schools and deaf clubs were internationally known to be deaf nodes and thus functioned as anchors for travelers. This is still the case: These places continue to function as tourist destinations—and even as local tourist offices—for deaf travelers, with deaf teachers and/or leaders sometimes asked to guide visitors. For deaf people who arrive in Kakuma Refugee Camp, deaf educational spaces have become havens; they are spaces where deaf people gather for education and socialization—assuming that they successfully find their way to these spaces (which is not always the case for deaf people born in rural areas; see Chapter 3). As mentioned previously, deaf people may be brought to school by other deaf people, such as Andrew Foster bringing deaf children from Adamorobe to the school he had established in Mampong, Ghana (Kusters, 2015). One day, in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Amandine and Abdi, a late-deafened refugee from Somalia, went to see a family with a young deaf girl. Adbi told Amandine that he had seen the girl on the street by chance. He had asked her where her family was, and he was able to meet her family—who are Somalis as well. Because Abdi could speak Somali, he was able to explain to the family about sign language. He taught the girl the fingerspelling alphabet that is used in Kenyan Sign Language. Thereafter, the child went to school in one of the deaf units. Similarly, Deng, the teacher at Fashoda Primary School, told Amandine that sometimes he went into the camp to seek out deaf children who were not yet in school.

Historically, deaf clubs and residential schools have been acknowledged as sites of identity formation, language learning, and transmission of deaf cultural practices, especially in the Global North and especially for white deaf people (Ladd, 2003; O’Brien et al., 2019; Padden & Humphries, 1988, 2005; Van Cleve & Crouch, 1989). As an illustration of this in the United Kingdom, the British Sign Language Broadcasting Trust (BSLBT) documentary film Found at the Deaf Club (Swinbourne, 2018a)¹ features three deaf people’s stories of how their discovery of the local deaf club changed their lives, because they “found” a new identity, learned a new language, and became a part of a community. Many deaf people, including migrants (see Chapter 4), have found their way into deaf communities “late,” and the existence of deaf clubs as more or less permanent spaces has facilitated this. Deaf clubs have not provided a haven indiscriminately, though; they have also been sites of racism to various degrees in different clubs. Some deaf clubs have also been attended mostly by deaf people from ethnic minorities (see Rinkoo Barpaga’s 2014 film, Double Discrimination).² Today, however, deaf clubs and schools are no longer havens and nodes to the same extent as in the past, with many of these “traditional” deaf nodes having been closed down in many parts of the world. Because institutions have been in decline for decades, it is now more difficult for mobile deaf people to find other deaf people by going to traditional deaf place-nodes. To put it baldly, the deaf club as we know it is dead—or, at least, it is dead in the United Kingdom, the location of the subproject on migration and the country where the MobileDeaf project is based. A shift in deaf educational policy in the 1970s and 1980s toward mainstreaming has led to the disappearance of permanent deaf spaces from British cities and towns from the 1990s to the present day (Jamieson et al., 2021). The abrupt closure of the Glasgow Deaf Club in 2019 after more than 200 years of existence reinforces the point that the deaf club as the central pillar of deaf sociality has been dying a slow death in the United Kingdom for the past 30 years and more—clinging on but showing little sign of renaissance.

In light of the growing trend of deaf club closures in the United Kingdom, United States, and Europe, Padden and Humphries (2005) argue for the need to move away from the centrality of deaf clubs as the “core” of “deaf culture.” However, emotional discussions about the demise of deaf clubs and the closure of residential schools continue to resonate in the British deaf media—including on the BBC’s See Hear (a program aimed at deaf viewers), in the British Deaf News magazine, and on the popular The Limping Chicken blog—as if it is a new or recent phenomenon. The impact of and responses to the closure of Bristol Deaf Club (which is in what was once Steve’s and Annelies’s home city, and where Steve briefly served on the management committee), and the University of Bristol’s Center for Deaf Studies were documented on film in David Ellington’s Lost Community (2014)³ and Lost Spaces (2016).⁴ Ellington captured the profound effect that the closures of permanent deaf spaces—despite intense protests and activism—had on deaf people living in Bristol, which was indicative of the emotional attachment that local deaf people feel toward their clubs (O’Brien et al., 2019). Our statement about the death of the deaf club is thus not intended to be flippant.

Even though we suggest that the deaf club as we know it is dead, this does not mean that we believe that networks are drying up or that deaf communities are disappearing; nor does it mean that we believe that deaf clubs should be given up or that they have been completely wiped out. On the contrary, the continued existence of deaf clubs is evidence of the resilience that deaf people all over the world have repeatedly shown in keeping their culture and language alive, just as they continued to do when signing was prohibited in deaf schools (Ladd, 2003). Deaf clubs are precious, and they require preserving and protecting. There is a case for the still-existing ones diversifying into “hubs” or cultural centers, as, for example, in the cases of Edinburgh, Birmingham, Cardiff, and Manchester.

However, the dwindling of these traditional spaces has closed off some of the typical avenues for becoming a part of deaf networks and finding spaces to belong (see Chapter 9). It is time to look back on the clubs as relics of an era where they were central to deaf experiences while recognizing that they play a small or minor role in modern deaf experiences. In other words, to focus only on the deaf club as a central deaf space for deaf locals—and thus also for deaf international visitors and migrants—no longer holds. Although local and national deaf communities mourn their deaf clubs and their histories, the demise of deaf clubs also affects deaf international visitors and migrants, changing (and perhaps reducing) the places in which they can “tie in” to deaf communities.

In the London-based subproject, Steve and Sanchayeeta examined how new migrants to the United Kingdom find their way within London’s deaf landscape. In the map they created of the 22 different spaces visited (see Chapter 4), only two were deaf club buildings. One of the two deaf clubs was modern and thriving this being the Jewish Deaf Association—a lively place, with enthusiastic workers and supporters, and a café that not only serves the public but offers work experience for deaf people. The other, Saint John’s Deaf Club in north London, was typical of the deaf clubs with which Steve is more familiar: a jaded-looking building in need of repair. On an evening when Steve visited, it was sparsely attended; nevertheless, at other times it was a vibrant, central meeting point for events such as games (e.g., men’s and women’s poker and bingo), festivals, and special occasions, such as to celebrate national events related to the British monarchy or to watch football [soccer] matches on screen.

The map exercise also visualized how contemporary deaf spaces are increasingly ephemeral, temporary, and/or borrowed spaces, such as the deaf pub evenings that take place in mainstream bars in the United Kingdom. When creating the map, Steve and Sanchayeeta documented a multiplicity of spaces other than deaf clubs where deaf people meet, including “deaf cafés,” so-called because they are frequented by deaf people. These deaf spaces are created by the people who coordinate these events, as well as by the people who attend them (O’Brien, 2005). These organized events and affinity groups are examples of how deaf(blind) people capitalize on existing infrastructures to create their own (minoritized) spaces (see Edwards, 2018; Kusters, 2017a). For example, Kusters (2017a) has shown how daily gatherings of deaf people in train compartments are hubs (i.e., place-nodes) in Mumbai deaf networks, where deaf spaces flourish. Deaf people adapt (to) material, social, and virtual environments, developing strategies to build and maintain social networks. Deaf migrants often attended the events documented by Steve and Sanchayeeta, but not always and not on a regular basis. Yet, participation in one space often leads to further participation—including in other, connected spaces. The fact that some deaf migrants were observed at several different events shows that the places identified and documented by Steve and Sanchayeeta were interconnected nodes.

Tying into these networks was not automatic for many migrants: Entry points were needed. Deaf migrants found the patterns of gathering of British deaf people different from what they were used to: For example, British deaf people tend to form into “closed groups” that are hidden but thriving across the capital. Hence, Shahina, from India, longed to meet more deaf Londoners to discuss broader political and social issues, but she struggled to find any that matched her interests. However, Emily (Canada) met regularly with British deaf Londoners to enjoy meals out, the theater, and other social events, and Lena (Russia) socialized at a “deaf café” with people who felt that they fell “in-between” deaf and hearing groups. Often, being brought into a certain place-node was a turning point. Adrian, from Romania, spent at least 2 years working in the capital before he was introduced to City Lit college, a key place where deaf migrants from all over London congregate. When Chris arrived in London from Kakuma Refugee Camp, a support worker from a mainstream charitable organization took him along to City Lit. Significantly, it was not a deaf organization that provided this link, even though deaf organizations were far more visible and active when he arrived in the early 2000s compared to the time of this writing.

City Lit has had connections with deaf people going back several decades, having run courses in British Sign Language (BSL) and English. It has a service dedicated to providing other courses for deaf people, such as classes in math or computing, and it also provides access to mainstream courses with communication support (e.g., interpreting, note-taking). City Lit is a remarkably international deaf place-node in terms of the numbers and variety of deaf migrants who attend. Just a sample of those taking City Lit courses include people from Latvia, Romania, Venezuela, Iran, Kuwait, Mongolia, Sierra Leone, Poland, Pakistan, Ireland, Australia, and many more. The English courses delivered in BSL that Steve and Sanchayeeta observed (see Chapter 8) are not exclusively for migrants, but they were, nevertheless, mainly made up of deaf people who have migrated. On visiting, it became quickly apparent that, in addition to being a place where deaf people could improve their English and gain other skills, City Lit was highly recognized as a “hub of sociality” (see Heap, 2006) for meeting other (British and international) deaf people and for getting a variety of information. People were not only learning BSL and/or English, but they were also learning about “British culture”—vital for acquiring the social and cultural capital to navigate the United Kingdom. In other words, it was a node where deaf migrants had the opportunity to socialize with each other before and after courses, and so to learn from one another informally.

One of the tutors explained to Steve that “often students arrive early, and stay on afterward; it’s the only social time they have meeting with other deaf, otherwise they would be stuck at home doing nothing.”

The precarity of deaf spaces is a reality of deaf people’s lives in London, including those of deaf migrants when they arrive in, or pass through, the capital. Although it may not seem like it on first consideration, City Lit college is a good example of a precarious deaf space: Despite having provided BSL courses for several decades, and despite the courses typically having long waiting lists, budget cuts, and restructuring have led to them being reduced in recent years, and they remain somewhat at risk. Additionally, the precarity of London’s deaf spaces may manifest itself in other ways. For example, a deaf migrant might discover and attend the Victoria Wetherspoons pub social and meet many people there but arrive the following month to find that, unbeknown to them, the social had had to move location or had ceased to exist. Or they might visit Beckton Deaf Club, as Steve did on several occasions—a large hall in a modern community center, which is hired by the voluntary association. On one occasion, they would find several migrants present mixing with other deaf Londoners; on another, just one or two; at other times, no migrants at all. The number of deaf club attendees would fluctuate week to week, so visiting on a poorly attended evening, with just a few people in a large hall, would likely be intimidating for a newcomer.

The erratic level of attendance prompts the question: How long will these spaces continue to operate? The Redbridge Deaf Cafe and Enfield Deaf Club, for example, had already moved location once and were, during the fieldwork period, either moving again or at risk of closing down entirely, victim to cuts in funding and service provision. The Slug and Lettuce pub gathering, held at the Leicester Square branch, is one space that has enjoyed long-term success, and its attendees were planning for its 10th anniversary while the research project was underway. Even so, this too had a precarious feel to it, being wholly reliant on volunteers and the permission of the pub management to keep it in place; indeed, there were occasions when the management moved the gathering to different areas in the pub or allocated inappropriately confined or too-public spaces that affected the “deaf space” feel of the event.

These experiences of deaf place-nodes as frequently shifting may be shared by any Londoner and by any British deaf person moving to the capital for the first time; however, the latter are likely to have deaf networks already in place in the United Kingdom to tap into and use to find alternative deaf nodes. For example, as a British deaf person who had recently moved back to London from another city in the United Kingdom, Steve already knew some deaf Londoners and could meet them at the Stratford Picturehouse’s “888 Club” and the Shakespeare’s Head pub in Holborn. At these and other places, Steve would encounter people he had not seen for many years, or he would be introduced to other deaf people via those he already knew. A newly arrived migrant, on the other hand, would not necessarily know a single person when they attend a deaf event, nor would they have any known connections with people in deaf spaces. Another observation about precarious deaf spaces is that deaf migrants do not automatically feel at home in the spaces that they do find and access (see Chapter 9). It may take a lot more effort and searching to find spaces where they feel they belong, and being well-networked would make it considerably easier to access these.

In the following excerpt from the London project, we can see how crucial networks are for finding information within this context of precariousness. Although many deaf migrants were able to establish some social contacts within the spaces covered by Steve and Sanchayeeta, many others were not just in search of signing spaces but also of information, and they were not immediately able to locate the right institutional spaces where they could find support. For example, Fareed, a migrant from Lebanon, was trying to resolve issues with his and his deaf brother’s visas. Due to communication barriers, the brothers struggled to access information from the Home Office. They attempted to find local deaf networks by identifying physical locations where they hoped to get help from local deaf people, but for a while, they could not find anyone who could help:

As deaf people, we had problems accessing any advice, we were very disheartened and struggled to find anyone or anywhere to help us. We didn’t know anyone either. We found a pub, and asked if any deaf people were local, but the answer was no. There were three deaf men who would come to the pub in the evening after work, but when we met with them, they really weren’t sure how they could help. I only had ASL, and didn’t understand much BSL, and they were British and not sure how the system worked with the passports and so on. My brother and I didn’t know where to go; these men didn’t know who could help us, and they […] did give us the name of a pub where deaf people met. I think it was in Clapham Junction. There’s a get-together every Wednesday there, and they gave us the address. We were able to find this pub, but the people there didn’t know how to help us either. They had no knowledge of immigration or the Home Office or local services and so on. We gave up. It took a very long time to find anyone who could help; eventually we found a deaf person […] who finally helped us, and we could tell them everything that had happened.

In the absence of a central information point for deaf migrants, an individual willing to help the brothers needed to be identified, and being unable to make use of previous connections, the two had to start networking (Schapendonk, 2015) from scratch. In this process, temporary deaf place-nodes were not sufficient, and institutional deaf place-nodes could not be found. The deaf brothers’ reliance on networking was successful in the end, but it was an arduous process made more difficult by their own lack of BSL and social capital, and by the lack of relevant knowledge held by the deaf people they managed to locate. It is not unimaginable that there was also an undercurrent of xenophobia and Islamophobia at work: The deaf locals did not know the new deaf arrivals and may have been reluctant to help them.

These examples show that translocal networks manifest in places and through connections between places and people, that these places are often precarious, and that these connections may be fragile, dependent on social capital, unevenly distributed, and subject to gatekeeping. In 1 week, 1 month, or 1 year, the place-node could be gone—either shut down without being replaced, or having been moved to a different location or venue. This is a far cry from the situation in the mid- to late-20th century, when the deaf club or deaf center was a vital deaf node in every city and most towns; the majority were far from precarious, at least in the United Kingdom.

Returning to the topic of deaf schools, formerly hubs for international visitors, those remaining in the Global North have become increasingly inaccessible for deaf visitors for reasons including safeguarding and security. In the United States and Europe, it is no longer usually considered appropriate for tourists to show up unannounced at deaf schools, and they are not always allowed in. Conversely, visitors often show up unannounced at schools in the Global South expecting access (see Moriarty Harrelson, 2015). Deaf schools and clubs are still considered important places for tourists to the Global South to visit because of the emotional resonance, sense of novelty, and invocation of nostalgia due to the demise of equivalent institutions in much of the Global North; it also feeds the desire to “see how they live” (see #deaftravel), and the relative accessibility of these deaf schools to tourists is considered problematic by some (see Moriarty Harrelson, 2015, and Chapter 6; also #deaftravel: Deaf tourism in Bali).

The question of visits to deaf schools usefully illustrates that, in addition to differences in levels of access to certain nodes, there are also different ideas about which locales are appropriate, or not appropriate, to visit as a tourist. Deaf tour guides Gio and Wahyu had different philosophies on tourist visits to deaf schools in Bali: Gio, the French guide living in Indonesia, who compared tourist visits to deaf schools and to Bengkala with going to the zoo, remarked on the cumulative disruptive effect of so many visitors on the children’s education, explicitly commenting on the local impact of international deaf mobility. On the other hand, Wahyu, who is Indonesian, frequently brings deaf tourists to schools in Bengkala despite the arduous drive because it is “what they want to see.”

The differences in Gio’s and Wahyu’s philosophies also reflect their networks in Bali. Gio has access to the sociopolitical organization Bali Deaf Community (which he has previously sponsored) and draws on this for tourist activities. He was able to organize a dinner to introduce members of Bali Deaf Community to members of the Travass tour group; this was built into his tour schedule, and it involved hiring hearing Balinese drivers to bring the group to the warung (a small restaurant serving Indonesian food). In contrast, Wahyu’s guiding is smaller scale, typically limited to the number of people who can sit comfortably in his car; for larger groups, he hires a small van. Different place-nodes are thus linked together and marked up on the deaf mental map of Bali by virtue of the differential practices of the two guides. Indeed, as well as shaping which place-nodes are tied into (and to what extent), influential individuals may themselves become “destinations” on the deaf mental map. In the following section, we explore the various roles played by person-nodes within a network.

Individuals as Nodes

Individuals are nodes that connect other individuals in the network to each other; these connections can result in international mobility. For example, for South Asian communities, networks are vital for meeting a potential bride or groom. All five Indian women in Sanchayeeta’s study had moved to London in the context of marriage, and they had been introduced to their husbands through family or friends’ networks. Aisha met her deaf husband through his deaf aunt on his mother’s side. In the United Kingdom, the husband’s deaf mother had been seeking a suitable bride (preferably a Muslim Asian) for her oldest son, but the deaf women he had met and interacted with in Britain all had “histories” known to their social groups (reflecting the previously mentioned “it’s a small world” feeling). In common with many men in this community, he had a tacit preference for someone with “a clean slate.” Because the mother and son could not find anyone who met their expectations, his mother turned to her deaf sister, who lives in India, to find someone suitable. This deaf aunt attended various deaf events and deaf clubs in Mumbai with her sister’s request on her mind. When she encountered Aisha at a deaf wedding in Mumbai, she enquired if she was single and whether she was interested in meeting her nephew as a possible future partner. Because Aisha’s mother was pressuring her to get married, she agreed to be introduced to the man online. After 4 years of interacting with him online, they got married. Seema’s husband had also been unable to find a suitable bride in his U.K. network and was introduced to Seema by Meera, another of Sanchayeeta’s participants. Meera had already taken up the role of matchmaker for Indian deaf people, and she used her network in India to connect with Seema in Mumbai. The two women first met in person after Seema’s migration to London.

Individuals themselves are not stationary nodes, but they are points of convergence for networks. This is exemplified by Shahina, whose individual network operates on multiple scales, from London-based networks, India-based networks, and U.S.-based networks to global networks of deaf people encompassing a wide geographical area—from Korea, to London, to San Francisco. Shahina is a woman originally from India who resided in London at the time of interview but who had spent many years in the United States for study at Gallaudet University and other institutions. In Shahina’s early interviews (which took place during the coronavirus pandemic), she explained to Sanchayeeta that she felt more connected to the deaf friends that she had made in the United States, where she used to live and study. She also had a close friend from South Africa whom she had met at Gallaudet University, who was living in London, and she met up with her from time to time. Her deaf best friend, who she met while traveling around Korea, is originally from the Philippines, and their friendship deepened after Shahina’s friend visited her in India and then in London. Shahina’s network also includes another layer of connections through her husband (a deaf Londoner, originally from Lebanon), whose deaf brother also knew her Filipino friend. It was during a visit to London from San Francisco that she met her future husband’s deaf brother through a video-chat application, Camfrog, that deaf people used to connect with each other in the early 2000s. Shahina later arranged for a group of deaf people from India to visit the Philippines, and her Filipino friend asked if a Lebanese man living in London (now Shahina’s husband) could join them. They connected first on Facebook and WhatsApp, he joined the tour group, and they became a couple. After a long-distance relationship, Shahina moved to London to marry him.

This brief example showcases the various scales and formations of deaf networks. It shows the complex, multilayered, deeply tangled interconnectedness of globally mobile deaf people. The key people involved originate from multiple countries in the Global South, and some of them, including Shahina, who has high network capital, are financially privileged and hypermobile for professional and personal reasons. They engage in different types of mobilities, some of which are covered in this book: Shahina migrated for study from India to San Francisco, traveled to Korea for tourism, and then hosted her best friend from the Philippines in both places that she considers to be “home”—that is, India and London. As a result of Shahina and her friends’ tourist mobilities, she met her future husband, first via social media and then in the Philippines, and then she migrated for marriage to be with him in London. This is an example of the necessity of studying different types of mobility together because mobilities manifest as interconnected (see Chapter 1).

Shahina’s mobility trajectory also shows that Gallaudet is a key node where international connections are made, and these networks can be reactivated after international students return home (also see Breivik, 2005). Another illustration of this comes from Erin’s fieldwork in Bali. When she mentioned to one group of tourists that she lived in Washington, DC, three of them (one from Mumbai, India, and a couple from Australia) asked her whether she knew Gallaudet. Erin explained that she had worked at Gallaudet for several years before finishing her doctorate and moving on to Heriot-Watt University. The white couple from Australia mentioned the name of a person who was originally from Australia but had moved to the United States and then worked at Gallaudet. Erin said that she knew that person. This led to sharing the names of other people who had connections with Australia and Gallaudet, as well as people with similar connections from India, to try to identify overlaps in their respective networks. This name-sharing is a means of placing people within a constellation of overlapping networks.

In the excerpt below, a tourist that Erin interviewed in Bali, who is from the United States and of East Asian descent, told her about her use of a different kind of deaf network of individuals when traveling through Europe through the social networking service Couchsurfing. Through this network, travelers can connect with people who are happy to host them in their home for free (i.e., on their couch or elsewhere). She met her deaf husband, a white Italian citizen, through the deaf network on Couchsurfing:

After university, I went backpacking for 1 year on my own. I went to Belgium for a deaf academic conference, and I thought to use that time to travel around Europe. I saw Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy—which is where I met him. It was while I was traveling. I found him on the internet, through the website Couchsurfing. There is a deaf, signing group on Couchsurfing where the names of countries are posted, and he volunteered for me to stay at his place. After that I was considering how I could move to Italy, to have the experience of living in another country since I grew up in America. I found a [study] grant and it was easy for me to do that for 2 and a half years. Now, I live there because I married him.

This is another example of how different mobilities and movements through different networks flow into each other: professional mobility in the form of a conference, then tourism in the form of backpacking (and meeting the future partner in that process), and then migration for study and marriage migration. These two examples show how networking—that is, individuals actively maintaining their own networks and/or expanding these networks—affects decisions about where to be mobile to and where to migrate or travel to.

In the previous Couchsurfing example, a deaf tourist used an existing network to access different kinds of resources, including the social capital associated with meeting and/or staying with local deaf people in their homes. Through this, she could experience (or “consume”) aspects of local lives, receive free local guidance, and experience a kind of authenticity. Other approaches can be used to learn about destinations without a strong internet presence, as explained in an interview Erin conducted with a group of frequent travelers from the United States. A deaf man who identified as an Asian American and who had traveled extensively, stated:

When I went to Brazil, I knew people that had been there before and used that information to my advantage. It’s the same thing with deaf clubs. There are some unknown places, or places without any information that I have seen. For example, in the Galapagos, I asked if anyone knew any deaf people who were living there, and I didn’t get any details or contacts. There weren’t even any deaf schools. It seems it is different on the mainland, but it just depends on where you go. It depends on what kind of information is already there online and what people are already there in that particular place. […] The key is to find people who are already there. There is a person from Chile who I asked if they knew anyone [in Easter Island], and they sent me the name of someone and I made the effort to get in touch with them.

This example further exemplifies that traditional deaf places like clubs and schools are still automatically thought of as destinations or network hubs by internationally mobile deaf people; it also shows that it is a common practice among deaf tourists to locate individuals in their networks who can then either facilitate their travel or can introduce them to others. These often are weak ties that then serve as bridges between clusters of nodes—that is, introducing deaf newcomers into local networks. Individuals who connect clusters of nodes are thus gateways into networks in other countries.

In another example, when Annelies lived in Mumbai with her husband Sujit, they were often contacted by Frontrunners students who wanted to do their internship in Mumbai, and by former students traveling in India. Sujit had himself participated in Frontrunners in 2007, and the Frontrunners of previous and subsequent years knew of him. They often asked to stay in Sujit’s deaf parents’ flat (so as to “see how they live”) or in the nearby flat where Annelies and Sujit were living, or they asked to be introduced to other deaf contacts in India with whom they could stay. Sujit and Annelies’s place also was a “hub of sociality” for deaf people (Indian as well as international) to gather in groups because, unlike most local deaf people, they did not live with extended family. It was therefore a translocal place-node, where deaf mobilities (local and international) of different scales converged.

The use of the internet in general (e.g., email), and social media in particular, is often central to contemporary connections of this type. Many deaf people collect the social media accounts (e.g., Facebook, Instagram) of deaf people from other countries, including people they have met online or face to face in international encounters (e.g., in the context of tourism or sports events) and whose contact details they save for possible future use (including for information, guiding, or hosting). They may have met this person only once and only briefly, but even this type of weak tie can be mobilized. Facebook also can be used to create links with deaf locals. This is the strategy used, for example, by Ambrose Murangira, from Uganda, who Annelies interviewed at the XVIII WFD congress in 2019. Ambrose is a well-traveled deaf person and disability activist who has worked in several deaf organizations, including as president. He has visited the United States, the United Kingdom, several European countries, China, several Arab countries, and many countries in Africa. He was working for a disability organization at the time of the interview, and he said:

When I fly somewhere, and it is not related to deafness but for a general program, I research on Facebook if there are local deaf people there. There must be some. I contact them and then I meet with one or two local deaf people for a chat and beer. Beer, yes—and we chat. I feel comfortable meeting deaf people. […] They are always happy to show me around and tell me stories about some things. […] Hearing people tell me they don’t have time for me. If I am going somewhere—let’s say on a train—[and] I ask a hearing person for help, they say it with spoken words and leave. If I show another person where I want to go, they just leave as well. That is a challenge, but when a deaf person realizes we are both deaf, they get excited and they explain everything to me. That is soothing and feels like home.

Ambrose taps into local deaf networks via social media. It is likely that Ambrose’s positionality as a man, a good communicator who is fluent in International Sign (IS), and a well-respected deaf professional, has helped him to tie into local networks in the countries he has visited. Ambrose mentioned that he bonds over a beer. Alcohol often functions as a social lubricant in deaf spaces. He refers to international deaf networks as “home,” using a metaphor that is very common in deaf communities (Breivik, 2005; see Chapter 9). It is noteworthy, however, that Ambrose, a black African, did not talk about racism or other negative experiences in this interview; other deaf people of color have shared stories of racism when trying to connect to white people in the Global North (see Chapters 4 and 9).

Familiar with this networking practice of connecting to (often well-connected) deaf individuals, deaf tourists also have posted vlogs on social media asking their social networks and affinity groups (e.g., the people in the Solo Deaf Traveler Facebook group) where to find local deaf people in the countries they will visit. Hashtags are often used with great success to find other deaf travelers with similar interests, which is why the MobileDeaf film on deaf tourism is called #deaftravel. It highlights the various scales and functions of deaf networks, such as the deaf networks on social media, which sometimes become real-life networks. Many deaf travelers (and entertainers and social media influencers) use the #DeafTravel hashtag to find other accounts to follow, and as part of her fieldwork methodology, Erin also used it to find and contact people who were traveling in Bali to see if they would be interested in participating in her research project (see Chapter 2).

Hospitality, in the form of guiding or hosting in homes, here emerges as a mechanism based on networks and used to expand networks. The mobilization of weak ties between hosts and guests does not necessarily carry the expectation that long-term relationships (i.e., strong ties) will be established (although some hosts may have such expectations). Instead, the expectation is that people who have been hosted will also host others at another time. That is, there appears to be a type of “generalized reciprocity” between deaf people that is similar to the reciprocal, intercultural rationales of both the Couchsurfing community and the Esperanto movement, both of which are emerging as cosmopolitan practices (Fians, 2021a).⁵

By hosting, deaf people perform deaf cosmopolitanism: hosts by interacting with the “stranger,” and guests by “seeing how they live” (see Chapter 6). Typically, deaf guests will reciprocate by handing over a small souvenir from their own country; cooking a meal from their country; telling the host more about their country; sharing travel stories; paying for drinks, food, or meals; featuring in photos; spending time with the host and their family; and demonstrating signs from one or more foreign sign languages (see Chapter 8). In Bengkala, Erin observed that tourists reciprocated by buying a birthday cake for one of their hosts, paying for some of the deaf villagers to join them on a boat trip in Lovina, and other similar acts. Hosting thus involves “scale shifts” from “individuals to representatives of entire collectivities” (Fians, 2021a, p. 13). The host and the hosted represent their home nations, often in stereotypical ways (see Chapter 5), exchanging food, stories, signs, and souvenirs. In the process, memories are created, which function as gifts in themselves. In this way, individual people (i.e., nodes) can be as much a destination as the country one visits (see Fians, 2021a). In one key example, Erin has observed the ways that people on social media (and in real life) talk about the Balinese guide Wahyu as if he himself is a deaf tourist attraction. It can be challenging to schedule a tour with Wahyu because he is so popular, and people rearrange their schedules to work with him. It is almost as though he himself is a “not to be missed” tourist destination or an item on the Deaf Bali itinerary to be checked off along with a visit to Bengkala. In this sense, Wahyu himself is a node in the glocal deaf circuit.

Hosting can also happen with the (indefinite) expectation of being able to tap into financial or material support in the future (see below). However, although an ethics of deaf hospitality involves inviting solo deaf backpackers or small groups of deaf backpackers into the home and allowing them to sleep there for free, this is not necessarily reciprocal because many deaf hosts (especially in the Global South) do not have the means to travel abroad. This is true of most, if not all, of the deaf villagers in Bengkala who welcome deaf tourists into their homes; as such, it is not an equitable ethos of exchange as idealized by the deaf ecosystem (see Chapter 6). One participant explained to Erin that when he traveled through Indonesia, he was wholeheartedly welcomed into strangers’ homes based on their signing deaf connection; however, when Erin asked him if the same thing would happen in his home country in Europe, he said, “No, my mother would not allow this, even though she is deaf herself.”

Deaf people from affluent countries who have lived for a long time in a country in the Global South but have returned to the Global North are often the point of contact for people from the Southern country looking for a homestay, especially as costs in affluent countries are typically steep. People do, of course, differ in terms of how far they are prepared to go in hosting: They may only host friends from that country, for example, or maybe friends of friends, but not people who are merely acquaintances. Similarly, although groups of deaf people visit the Global South to participate in, for example, empowerment camps (e.g., the Frontrunners trip to Ghana), reverse trips rarely happen (Kusters et al., 2015). Mobile deaf professionals generally have an easier time finding hosts (or are found hosts for) if they travel for an official visit (such as Ambrose) through their “official” position.

These examples show that internationally mobile deaf people who have privileged positionalities and high network capital live in affluent countries, and/or have already expansive networks have more chances to tap into local networks—often in nonreciprocal ways. This does not mean that tourism (or indeed professional trips abroad) is an activity in which it is only, or even mostly, the tourists who are active in mobilizing networks. Deaf local people also show agency in creating connections with foreign deaf tourists. For example, as a part of a tour of the Yogyakarta area by “informal” deaf guides (i.e., nonprofessional, often uncompensated guides), a few tourists and Erin visited a site known as the “chicken church,” a building ostensibly shaped like a dove (see Figure 7.5a). To Erin, the most interesting thing about this site was not the oddity of the building itself, but the deaf man who materialized at its entrance. He was one of two deaf brothers from a family living nearby (see Figure 7.5b). They told the deaf tourists they helped build the church, and they pointed out younger versions of themselves in the photographs displayed in the small exhibition area. At first, Erin thought it was a coincidence that the deaf tourist group had run into them. Later, she realized that there was a network of deaf people living in this part of Java who were communicating via WhatsApp video calls about the group of foreigners who had shown up. Erin realized this after observing these men on a WhatsApp video with their friends, one who lived next to a small temple, which then became the next destination on the tour. In this example, interconnected deaf individuals facilitate deaf tourism by positioning themselves in opportune places and by combining local networking with networking with deaf people from abroad. Often, this is done without financial compensation for their informal guiding services; tourists will typically pay for gas, meals, and entrance fees, but they will not necessarily pay the guide a fee. This is an example of translocality that shows how mobilities exist on different scales (local/international) simultaneously, and it demonstrates the role of links between people and places on the local level. It is also an example of how the visual languaging of deaf people makes them easy to spot in public spaces; it is therefore easy for spontaneous international meetings to be instigated between tourists and locals, some of whom come to offer their services as guides (also see Breivik, 2005, pp. 132–133).

Figure 7.5a. “Chicken church” in Yogyakarta.

Figure 7.5b. The two deaf men Erin met at the “chicken church” in Yogyakarta‎.

The previous example also illustrates the relationship between networks and material resources. Deaf networks are channels through which money, gifts, and patronage travel—that is, through which social capital is converted into economic capital, and network capital can be relied on as well as expanded. In other examples, deaf people from the Global North—as well as hearing people with a connection with deaf people, such as hearing heritage signers or hearing sign language interpreters—have met local deaf people while traversing the “glocal deaf circuit” (see Chapter 6) who have made a significant impression on them. These personal encounters may then inspire them to fundraise for these specific individuals. For example, Sujit (Annelies’s husband) worked as a sign language teacher and was active in various deaf associations in Mumbai. When a well-connected hearing man with deaf parents from the Netherlands learned that Sujit wanted to attend Frontrunners, he ensured that Sujit received funding from a Dutch deaf association. This shows how access to economic capital (i.e., funding) travels through deaf and other networks. Similarly, some deaf Indian filmmakers whose films were scheduled to be shown at the Clin d’Oeil festival in France were able to attend the festival themselves as a result of fundraising by Dutch people they had met in India who had been impressed with their films. These are examples of successful networking with people whose wealth or connections can enable others to travel internationally, sometimes upon the visitor’s initiative and at other times after explicit requests (see Chapter 10 for more on sponsorship and funding).

In other situations, “deaf villages” have attracted visitors and, therefore, material support; as nodes, some of these villages have been the focus of benefactors over a period of decades (Kusters, 2015). In Bengkala, some families have benefited from tourist benevolence. When she first arrived in the village, Erin was frequently asked, “Where do you sleep?”; sometimes, rival families would pressure her to stay with them. She was puzzled by this at the time, but after staying in the village for a few weeks, she realized that the villagers had a vested interest in where she stayed because hosting tourists could result in material benefits (typically money, but occasionally appliances such as a new refrigerator or television) and/or less tangible ones, including expanding their international networks, “collecting” contacts and learning about life outside the village.

Although the previous examples show successful transactions and interactions, there are many stories where deaf people, especially from the Global South, have been unable to gain support. For example, deaf refugees in Kakuma Refugee Camp also try to make use of networks, many of them in vain. When Abdi and Amandine would walk together through the streets of Kakuma Refugee Camp, he would often show her the former homes of those who had been resettled outside the camp. These homes had become deaf place-nodes on the deaf mental map, where memories of now-absent people would linger and be shared. Abdi would tell Amandine about the resettled deaf people’s lives, their friendships, and how he had lost contact with them after they were resettled:

After his deaf neighbor’s relocation, Abdi tried to maintain the relationship, seeing the potential for economic and social support for himself and other deaf people in the camp. This did not materialize, and the contact came to an end. Atem also reported how he had lost contact with deaf refugees who left Kakuma Refugee Camp:

This is an example of how deaf people may wish to access forms of capital via international deaf networks, but, having low network capital, meet with no success. It also shows how networks consist of interdependent contacts: If networks are not maintained, ties are broken (Schapendonk, 2015). Similarly, after her fieldwork in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Amandine found it difficult to contact deaf refugees online during the pandemic because of the low quality of internet connectivity in the camp. Indeed, the success of networking depends on timing, the means of contacting others, and the (potential) mutual benefits.

A person’s capacity to mobilize international networks is thus to some extent dependent on the degree to which they can access the resources necessary for maintaining their contacts. The unequal distribution of these resources, and the privilege of those with access to them (including ourselves), was a constant thread throughout each subproject. Through our respective research processes, we each became part of more and different networks (see Chapter 2), in which we were often asked for financial support—sometimes by people who employed the DEAF-SAME argument to undergird their requests (see, e.g., Kusters, 2015). Erin received many requests for financial help from her contacts in Bali, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns (see Chapter 10), and deaf refugees often asked Amandine to buy bikes, phones, and other valued items as gifts. It is likely that many deaf people in the Global South know stories about foreign deaf and hearing people who have helped others in their communities, or simply know that, through networks, they may gain access to financial resources; in other ways, they may be able to rely on, and expand, their network capital. These dynamics demonstrate the importance of recognizing the translocal context of relationships within international networks—that is, that they may be imbued with (implicit) hopes, assumptions, and/or expectations informed by geopolitical power imbalances and unequal distribution of resources.

Events as Nodes

In the previous sections, we have shown that deaf people tie into local networks and locate place- and person-nodes when navigating a country as newcomers, whether as tourists or migrants. We now focus on deaf professional networks that, by design, span multiple countries (often described as “transnational”; see Murray, 2007), and on the places where these networks manifest in in-person events. Scholars have theorized these connections and spaces in various ways. For example, writing about international deaf arts events and festivals in Europe and the United States, Schmitt (2015, p. 16) conceptualizes deaf interconnections as moving networks of physical and digital relations, with people themselves as knots and their connections as rubber strings. These networks are dynamic and constantly changing as people attend arts events and festivals in different places at different times. Schmitt imagines specific festivals as “a mess of entangled knots, as many related people are present in a single place at a single time […] [T]hen until the next festival, a net spreads, still with visible knots” (2015, p. 16). The rubber strings constantly contract and expand, and people are progressively entangled or disentangled in a form of compression and expansion of time and space. This visualization (see the center of Figure 7.6) is useful when thinking about how professional networks converge in places during events. In the discussion that follows, we focus mostly on Europe.

Figure 7.6. Fictionary map showing how networks converge at events.

In contrast to Schmitt’s dynamic conceptualization of international deaf networks, deaf transnationalism in early 19th-century central Europe was imagined as a wheel. Alumni of the deaf school in Paris formed the hub, and spokes connected white deaf men to other white deaf men of a similar social status in the United States and other European cities (Gulliver, 2015). Paris was thus seen as the central place for deaf transnationalism. At the 1889 International Congress of the Deaf, held in Paris, the demographic had become less Eurocentric and male, with more white women and non-European (primarily American) visitors joining. As more delegates from the United States participated in “global” deaf social and political activities, Paris was displaced as the center of deaf sociopolitical activity (Gulliver, 2015), and the connections became more net-like, spreading throughout Europe and the world.

Historically, the two primary spheres of deaf international engagement in Europe were sociopolitical network events and, from the early 20th century, deaf sports events (elsewhere, networks have been constructed along different parameters, such as focused on religion and/or education, as the example of Foster’s network demonstrates). Although international deaf professional networks have diversified today (see below), this history is still visible in some deaf Europeans’ discourse about networks. Within the sports world, the space of the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) and the European Union of the Deaf (EUD) events is often called SOCIAL (or SOZIAL)—the sign used is often produced with the mouthing “social” or “sozial,” and it is the same as the DGS (German) sign SOZIAL (see Figure 7.7). This sign roughly translates as “society” and is used in IS to refer to the sphere of deaf political leadership and language rights advocacy. Similarly, in the SOCIAL sphere (i.e., at WFD and EUD), SPORTS is often cited as an example where international deaf social norms and sign language use are different from those used in SOCIAL (and academic) “worlds.”

Many people participate in both types of spaces, sometimes at different points in their lives, with many deaf SOCIAL leaders having started out in SPORTS networks. People also can, and do, shift the space (and thus network) in which they primarily participate. For example, Danny de Weerdt, a white deaf male academic from Belgium who lives and works in Finland, started meeting people through international deaf sports events when he was 16 or 17, playing football [soccer], futsal, volleyball, and beach volleyball. A few years later, Danny began to attend EUD and WFD events, and later yet, he attended academic conferences, such as the Deaf Academics and SIGN conferences. His deaf father played an important role in his introductions to the sports and political worlds, as he described in an interview at the SIGN8 conference in Brazil:

Figure 7.7. SOZIAL.

My father was a leader of a sports delegation [where we mix with different people], and he’s also involved in EUD as he works with the Flemish Federation of the Deaf. They asked me to get involved, so I agreed to give it a try. I wasn’t sure about being involved in SOCIAL, as it’s a bit political for my liking. But I was encouraged to give it a try, so I went to have a look for myself and met various people: social workers, campaigners, EUD speakers. […] My dad insisted I meet Markku Jokinen, so I went and talked with him, then a while later I studied in Finland, so this is how I started getting involved in SOCIAL and academic spheres, and my involvement in SPORTS decreased.

Markku Jokinen, who Danny met through his father, is himself a sports leader who became involved in the SOCIAL world as president of the WFD and EUD; he formed an individual entry point for Danny into other networks. Later, Danny interacted with Markku at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, while he was studying and Markku was working there. This example shows how certain connections—and privileges—lead to further ones: Danny, his father, and Markku Jokinen are all white men who are well-connected in their countries. Other privileges also play a role, such as access to finances for travel and being part of a deaf family, which potentially bring access to, and status in, deaf networks. This shows how network capital works as an upward spiral.

As the examples of Danny and Markku indicate, deaf people may not limit their international activities to one network. They are involved in deaf SOCIAL, academic, and sports networks and may shift participation at various points in their lives. Today, there are myriad opportunities to build networks through participation in events that are not located in either the SPORTS or SOCIAL sphere, such as theater festivals, international parties, youth camps, academic exchanges, or other activities. There is an increasing number of smaller-scale events in more diverse sites that are targeted at different demographics; examples include the party that Frontrunners held in the Czech Republic for #FRWeekend with Czech Deaf Youth (see Chapter 5) and deaf yoga retreats in Bali organized by deaf Australian yoga teachers.

Danny explained how, in the past, deaf people traveling to participate in deaf sports in Europe (e.g., to sports competitions) would travel by bus to neighboring countries; today, it is easier to reach a broad range of places by plane. “Back then you met more of the same crowd in the same places, the same meeting places …,” said Danny. Nowadays, network clusters are connected in more disparate ways, as person-nodes travel between them. In an example of this, the first time that Mark, a teacher in the Frontrunners program, met Hyemi, a South Korean student, was at a World Federation of the Deaf Regional Secretariat for Asia camp in Singapore, in his role as a facilitator; he later met her again at Frontrunners in Denmark, in his role as a teacher. We met Hyemi at Frontrunners and then 2 years later at the 2019 Deaflympics in Italy, where she worked as a deaf interpreter with the South Korean snowboard team (see This Is IS: Episodes 1 and 6). Hyemi went from camp participant to student to interpreter, and she moved between networks to end up working at a SPORTS event.

Participation in international deaf professional networks can start at a young age, especially for white deaf Europeans. Some have the opportunity to attend children’s or youth camps organized by the European Union of Deaf Youth and the World Federation of the Deaf Youth Section (WFDYS). Some deaf children and youth with internationally mobile deaf parents may be taken by them to events, or they may meet international deaf visitors who visit their parents at home. Undoubtedly, the international scale is far more expansive for adults older than age 18, many of whom travel independently and either have the money to do so or can access other sources of funding. Frontrunners, for example, is a significant networking opportunity for deaf youth with the means to attend, but it is notable that it is attended mostly by Europeans who are already well networked, with quite a few of them coming from deaf families. In This Is IS: Episode 1, we learn that several of the European attendees had already attended various international deaf camps and sports events where they had used IS (the language of Frontrunners), whereas participants from the Global South tended to be newer to international networking and to IS. There also is evidence that networking leads to participation in Frontrunners: Different participants from the same country (e.g., India, South Korea) have attended in subsequent years, having learned about Frontrunners from former attendees (see Chapter 5).

In contrast, some people only “go international” in one particular or specific context. Some people from India, Lithuania, and other countries whom Annelies met at the 18th Deaf Chess Olympiad in Manchester, United Kingdom, in July 2018 told her they only traveled to international deaf events in the context of chess competitions. These events were thus contractions of nodes in chess-based deaf networks. However, the inclusion of chess in the 19th Winter Deaflympics in 2019 meant that deaf chess players who usually only traveled for chess competitions could now play chess within the context of a larger event, during which they would watch a wider array of sports and meet people with other interests. The Deaflympics was thus an event where different deaf (SPORTS) networks converged.

Sometimes, individuals traveling to events such as camps or the Deaflympics become friends with other attendees and then stick with them through the event or gathering (also see Breivik, 2005, p. 134). Additionally, deaf people who engage in international interactions often try to find out which international deaf networks they have in common. During an IS preconference workshop at the 2019 Deaf Academics Conference (DAC) in Iceland, participants were practicing IS and, at a given moment, the theme of sports came up. People were asking each other who had attended the Deaflympics, and being a (former) Deaflympics athlete was portrayed as being part of a “family.” The SPORTS world in general was often described as one big, egalitarian, “warm” family and contrasted with the more formal, “high-level,” “cold,” political, SOCIAL world. Similarly, people who had been to Frontrunners at one point since its establishment in 2005 were described as part of the Frontrunners “family.” People thus try to find out who “belongs” in which international deaf “family” (see Breivik et al., 2002).

In these conversations, people would also often discuss which events they had been to (e.g., which editions of the Deaflympics or DAC), marking locations on the deaf mental map of these networks. This is significant because it further marks these networks as translocal, connected to specific places where sets of nodes have converged in specific years. Many of these contractions of nodes take place in temporary host locations: The Deaflympics, for example, is held at a different location every time. However, they also can be based in the same place every time, such as the Clin d’Oeil festival in Reims, France. As this is a regular event occurring in the same city, it has become part of the glocal deaf circuit, a destination around which deaf people may plan a longer trip. Clin d’Oeil thus differs from events like the Deaflympics, WFD congresses, or DACs, as the latter examples become affixed not to one single location but to a series of locations on the deaf mental map. Whether fixed in one place or held in various places, official transnational deaf events are often entwined with deaf tourism (Solvang & Haualand, 2014), with visitors combining holidays with attendance at congresses and sports competitions. Indeed, in the summer of 2019, many deaf people from the United States planned several weeks of travel in Europe, beginning and ending in France: Clin d’Oeil took place from July 5 to 7, and the XVIII WFD congress in Paris from July 23 to 27 (see Chapter 7). The summer of 2019 thus functioned as a microcosm of deaf tourism on various scales, oscillating around official international deaf events.

As noted previously, certain events function more than others as places where multiple networks and nodes converge, and people (e.g., new acquaintances) often find out many years later that they were at the same event in a certain year. Essentially, large events such as Clin d’Oeil, the WFD congress, and the Deaflympics are places where different deaf networks converge. Attendees at these events come from a range of different backgrounds, are different types of travelers, and approach the event in different ways; this is reflected in the wide range of accommodation typically used, including five-star hotels, bunk beds in youth hostels, Airbnbs, staying with local friends, Couchsurfing, and staying at campsites. At mega-events, people from disparate networks are suddenly part of the same large deaf space (or a series of deaf spaces) consisting of hundreds or thousands of deaf people spread over a venue or city (Breivik et al., 2002). Enjoying a temporary majority status by “taking over” a neighborhood or city was an especially powerful experience for many mobile deaf people (Haualand, 2007).

The “deafening” of public spaces can happen on different scales and levels of organization. It can entail the deafening of a particular bar or pub on the first Friday of every month, as at the monthly Deaf Night Out event in Washington, DC, or of a small-scale public space like the steps of a now-defunct nightclub on the river in Kampot, Cambodia, where deaf people meet daily after work to chat and informally circulate knowledge (Moriarty Harrelson, 2015). In the case of international deaf mega-events, the deafening of public spaces can be at the scale of the “takeover” of a street or part of a city. As public spaces become deafened, the linguistic landscape (Shohamy & Gorter, 2008) of the city becomes marked by the event itself. Examples of this visibility include banners in the towns where the 2019 Winter Deaflympics were organized (see This Is IS: Episode 6), posters directing people to specific lecture halls or venues, and clusters of people signing to each other. The deafening of public space includes large numbers of deaf people eating, drinking, and partying in public restaurants, bars, and so forth. In hospitality venues around the conference location, deaf people become very visible and expect service to be on their terms—that gesturing and writing will be used, for example (Haualand, 2002). Several participants stated that the deafening of public spaces that accompanies participating in huge events allows deaf people to feel like hearing people typically feel because they are in the majority and sign language use is assumed (see also Breivik, 2005, and De Clerck, 2007). Transnational events may have reverberations beyond the conference or festival site, transforming the broader locality; this transformation of place indicates that these events are not only transnational but also translocal. The deafening of public space is a powerful magnet, putting a mark on the international deaf mental map.

At large events, there are often one or more large pubs and/or other public venues that become central places for attendees to meet (Breivik et al., 2002). At the 2019 WFD congress, this was The Canadian Embassy Pub (or the “Canada Pub,” as it was known to delegates), the “official” WFD pub whose staff had learned some relevant signs. Other venues around the conference center also served the purpose, with pubs and restaurants surrounding the venue used for ad hoc gatherings of international groups of people who knew each other or who had met each other at the event. Examples include “rainbow evenings” for LGBTQIA+ attendees, meetings of deafblind people using Protactile and hands-on signing, and a group of people from the Indian delegation and Indian migrants. The temporary reversal of deaf-as-minority to deaf-as-majority often involves more people than those with a ticket to the event itself. Many people travel only to participate in the convergence of networks—and the resulting intensive socializing at parties and pub evenings—and not to attend the event itself due to the high cost of participating. Others only purchase a day ticket for an event that lasts several days, combining this with a city trip and meeting friends in pubs and restaurants outside of the event location. They thus enjoy the deafened city landscape and can participate in deaf-friendly tours of the city and in museums; the WFD congress is especially known for this.

When Annelies and Erin did fieldwork at Clin d’Oeil, large numbers of signers were visible everywhere in Reims, sitting in cafés and chatting or walking in groups. During these events, attendees often recognized each other as “fellow travelers” at the festival. Sometimes, this appeared to happen on an intuitive level because deaf people are often able to spot other deaf people by picking up on cues such as their way of looking around them (see Bahan, 2008); additionally, attendees were easily identifiable by their Clin d’Oeil lanyards. Annelies noted that when she and the cameramen she worked with (Sujit and Jorn) were slightly lost on the first evening, they were able to simply ask a deaf person, who was easy to identify by their public signing, lanyard, or hearing aids; similarly, they themselves were identified by their conference lanyards and approached by a pair of lost Australians looking for WINK (the sign name of Clin d’Oeil). The Australians were walking in the wrong direction and had identified the team by their lanyard rather than by signing (because they were not signing when they were approached, but eating croissants). Within a deafened space, deaf people thus act like compasses or guides.

While at Clin d’Oeil, Erin struck up a conversation in a busy café with a group of three white people in their 60s or 70s. Two of them were a couple from Cyprus; the other was a woman from Italy who explained that they had met through a mutual friend while on vacation in England. They had been friends ever since and had decided to come on vacation to Clin d’Oeil together. This is another example of how different forms and scales of deaf mobility can flow into each other: Tourism within Europe led to an international friendship, which was then maintained at a deaf mega-event at another European location.

At these place-nodes where different networks converge, people may move to varying degrees between the different groups that emerge within the event. Some move through the entire event alone or with the same friend or the same group of people, whereas others “hop” between people and groups. The latter may sit with one person to watch a presentation or performance, have lunch together with others, have meetings with yet others, and so on, networking with people with similar interests or from the same country and catching up with people who went to the same camp or event many years ago (see Chapter 5). People who maintain networks at conferences may not only do so in person but also via WhatsApp, in groups established before or during the conference. These WhatsApp groups may be used for practical arrangements (e.g., liaising with people from the same country and their national sign language interpreters, keeping in touch with people sharing the same Airbnb) or for networking and sociality (e.g., groups of like-minded people interacting during the event).

All these opportunities for and ways of grouping serve similar purposes: Within a large, homogenizing conference, people reach out to each other and maintain and/or expand networks based on common backgrounds, interests, or experiences. When people identify as being part of more than one minority, they may move between different networks that have formed based on various minority identities—and may also experience conflicts. Annelies noted the example of a queer deaf person of color, who told her they had been “called out” by another deaf person of color for their interactions with white queer deaf people.

Large events also often have “satellite events”: events that are organized either at the event venue or in the environment of the event venue but that are not officially part of the event program. At the 2019 WFD congress, these included a Viking Party (an invitation-only party in an adjoining hotel hosted by the Nordic Council of the Deaf) and an open evening for women and nonbinary people in the congress venue for discussing issues regarding gender and feminism. Some of these events were well planned in advance (e.g., the Viking Party); others were arranged during the congress itself. For an example of the latter, it was observed that at the congress, deaf people from East Africa grouped together for meetings at lunch and in the evenings, usually standing in one of the large halls of the venue; West Africans and Central Africans did the same, as one group. Deaf people from the 22 Gulf countries also had a meeting. At these meetings, many of which were attended by Sujit (who was working with Annelies as a research assistant), they discussed local and regional politics, including language politics. For example, the Gulf group discussed whether there should be a pan–Arab Sign Language interpreter at the next WFD congress, the XIX Congress to be held in South Korea, because many of them did not understand the IS used at the event in Paris.⁶ Indeed, these smaller satellite events and groups also provided spaces where the main event could be vehemently criticized for the way it had been organized and where the lack of access to IS could be discussed (see Kusters, forthcoming), as well as issues connected to ableism, white privilege, and racism.

Festivals such as Clin d’Oeil are spaces where deaf people of all ages and of different (mostly European) networks converge, more so than at the WFD congresses. This is probably because they are associated with leisure and have a festive vibe, with the focus being on performances and screenings. Thomas Kold, a white deaf man from Denmark who was attending as a spectator, told Annelies in an interview that he considered Clin d’Oeil, which has been organized biennially since 2003, a “new Mecca”:

We need one important place where you can charge yourself up. In the past, people would go to the Deaflympics, but I’m sorry to say that the Deaflympics are being managed by more hearing people using interpreters. It’s become less of a sign language space, which is why the Deaf community have looked elsewhere for a sign language space and found Clin D’Oeil. It’s Deaf-managed, Deaf-led, and it’s an international space. You have culture here, children here, partying here, everything you could possibly want. It’s become our new Mecca where we can reflect on our Deafhood process and really examine who we are. You can meet new friends, new partners. You can meet all people from the Deaf community, watch diverse people perform, and even perform yourself.

The festival featured a variety of performance styles: theater, film, stand-up comedy, Visual Vernacular, poetry, street performers, and music. In comparison to the WFD congress, the atmosphere was informal, boozy, and often flirtatious, with some single deaf people attending the festival in hopes of meeting a new romantic partner. Many people did not seem focused on meeting new people for serious conversations; rather, most of the attendees enjoyed the performances, chatted, and partied with people they already knew or whom they met through their network connections or by socializing, often under the influence of alcohol. Clin d’Oeil is a place where networks converge in a celebratory way and are reinvigorated.

At leisure-focused or celebratory events such as these, different networks converge—a function that Thomas suggested was formerly fulfilled by the Deaflympics before it became “more hearing” (see This Is IS: Episode 6, and also Chapter 9). This latter comment reflects an underlying concern that these mega-events are, in essence, precarious spaces, despite the increasing number of different countries taking part in them. This sentiment was shared by many of the participants in Annelies’s fieldwork at the 2019 Winter Deaflympics, who told her that there are not as many “truly deaf” athletes as before (see Chapter 9). Clin d’Oeil is seen as an example of a “truly deaf” event; certainly, it was an event where a very broad diversity of networks converged—probably more than at the Deaflympics and the WFD congresses. However, it must be noted that these networks were much less international: People from African countries were virtually absent from the Clin d’Oeil scene (see This Is IS: Episode 3).

As an example of the convergence of networks at the 2019 Clin d’Oeil festival, Annelies, Sujit, and Erin were struck by the range of people they met and re-met during their fieldwork there. Annelies, who has lived in several countries, re-met people she had previously encountered from all over Europe, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and several Asian countries. Some of these she had met as a student in Bristol (2006–2010)—at the time, a node for other international students and visitors. Others had visited India as volunteers or tourists when she lived there between 2010 and 2013, and there were also people she’d met while living in Germany and (now) Scotland. She re-met people from the 2019 DAC in Iceland, a few months before Clin d’Oeil; at Frontrunners she had taught as a guest teacher; and she re-met participants from earlier MobileDeaf fieldwork at the SIGN8 conference in Brazil. She knew these people from different times, places, and networks, and different types of mobilities (labor and marriage migration; professional mobility as a researcher and lecturer; student mobility; tourism). Many other faces were vaguely familiar to her, but she could not immediately place them within her mental map, given how many different sets of networks had converged at the festival.

Annelies learned that many people at the festival had had the same experience of meeting people they knew from disparate places and networks in one place. Walking around the event with Sujit, people from India and from the “Frontrunners family” would sometimes recognize him first. Erin re-met at least 10 people from Australia and Europe whom she had previously interviewed in Bali. Another attendee, Adam, a white man originally from the United States who lived in Edinburgh at the time, said: “I saw so many faces I forgot I had forgotten about!” His experience of meeting people again after a very long time, people who were not part of his usual network—or even social media feeds—confirmed our impression of the extent of the convergence of networks at Clin d’Oeil. All four of us were at the festival for the first time, so the people we recognized were not as a result of previous attendance. This indexes Clin d’Oeil as a locale where (mostly European and majority white) networks converge and as an event where people are embedded within a web of intersecting networks. Its location in the center of Europe and the fact that Clin d’Oeil is organized every 2 years in the same venue on the same weekend has helped to “fix” it as a node, as people can easily plan for it.

Some people found the densely networked social aspect of Clin d’Oeil overwhelming. A Flemish white deaf couple, Tom and Sophie, who were both very active in youth work, remarked to Annelies that they were tired of having to greet people every few seconds: “There are too many people we know here,” said Tom. Sophie was surprised at how many people she knew from different contexts—from deaf camps, from the WFDYS, from DAC, and so on—and found the frequent greetings exhausting. Tom did not enjoy the superficial nature of the contact, saying: “People ask you how you came here, when you arrived, where you are staying. I would prefer to exchange information about which shows are worth visiting.” Phatic conversation (e.g., “small talk”) on such a frequent basis negatively affected his enjoyment of the event. Sophie added: “Now I know what it must be like in a deaf village; it’s not for me.” This is an interesting contrast with the people who actively seek out the experience of belonging that comes with immersion in a fully deaf space—or, in other words, the experience of being in a “deaf village” where everyday conversations with other deaf and hearing villagers in sign language is an imagined possibility (see Chapter 6).

The “village” metaphor is explicitly used at Clin d’Oeil: There is a particular space called “The Village” with food stalls, performances by street performers and dancers, and exhibitions where people can hang out in beanbag chairs to drink beer (or champagne!) and chat. Sophie’s comparison of Clin d’Oeil with “deaf villages” (which are in themselves diverse with regard to the amount of signing used therein; see Kusters, 2010) is symptomatic of the recognized search by deaf people for “deaf utopias” in the form of deafened spaces. People’s imaginings of such utopias render all spaces where signing is omnipresent as commensurable or comparable. However, living in a “deaf village” such as Bengkala is, evidently, very different from attending the Clin d’Oeil festival.

Examples such as these confirm the extent of networks for people who have the capacity to travel regularly over a long period of their lives (i.e., have privileged positionalities as well as high network capital) and who move through different networks on different scales. A person who only participates in one international event in their life, and who does not participate in online deaf spaces, would find it challenging to build on the networks developed there at other events and in other networks. It is often the repetition and perpetuation of international mobility that leads to this privileged experience of knowing people in different networks, and growing network capital in an upward spiral. Something that is not apparent in the previous stories are incidents based on categories of difference, such as racism and ableism, that take place at these international events, often in the form of microaggressions (e.g., pretending not to recognize people, not greeting them, or being unwilling to interact with them; see also Chapter 9). For example, while working as a cameraman at Clin d’Oeil (for This Is IS: Episode 3), Sujit noted that responses toward him, an Indian man with a camera, were very different from the responses to Jorn, the other, white cameraman. People tended to be reluctant to be filmed by Sujit, while being accepting of Jorn.

In another example, the black deaf organization Saved By The Sign released a “public service announcement” video on social media at the 2022 edition of Clin d’Oeil, requesting white people not to touch black people’s hair (Saved By The Sign, 2022).⁷ After the event, they released another video, in which Romel (a black Swedish man, one of the founders of Saved By The Sign) reported that he had especially appreciated meeting black deaf people at Clin d’Oeil, some of whom he had only met online before, and expressed his dream for a future festival for black deaf people of all ages from all over the world to celebrate, share, recharge, and provide role models for each other (Saved By The Sign & Belcher, 2022).⁸ His video articulates the need for a place-node where networks of black deaf people can converge.

The networking experience at Clin d’Oeil starkly contrasted with Annelies’s fieldwork at the 2019 Winter Deaflympics 5 months later. At the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf (ICSD) congress and in the various sports events, she did not recognize more than a dozen people because she was very new to the sports world. It also contrasted with her experience at the DOOR International campus at Kenya (see Chapter 5). Many people she met at DOOR did not know the organizations and events she mentioned to them (e.g., Clin D’Oeil, Frontrunners), and Annelies did not know some of the Christian deaf international organizations and events the people at DOOR mentioned to her. Conversely, although many people in Europe did not know about DOOR when Annelies mentioned it, many deaf Indians did know of it as a multilingual and international deaf place. While at DOOR, Annelies happened to meet two people she knew from India: Rahul, a former student of Sujit, and Charles, who was from Burundi and had, with Rahul, taken an international degree course in Applied Sign Linguistics in North India. Rahul and Charles are part of networks of applied linguists seeking South–South collaboration (see This Is IS: Episodes 2 and 3), as well as Christian networks; this is reminiscent of Foster’s network mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. These examples show how, whereas some network clusters frequently come together, others have minimal overlap but may still be linked via weak ties.

It can be very challenging to start networking “from scratch” at such large events. Some participants at the WFD said that they had experienced racism within this larger space. While working as Annelies’s research assistant at the WFD congress, Sujit talked with a deaf person from Kenya on the evening of the closing gala. Attendees were transported to the gala in buses; the black deaf Kenyan was the last person to get on a bus. As he walked to the last seat, he smiled at the people he passed (who were almost exclusively white) and tried to make eye contact, but they ignored him. He sat down next to Sujit (one of the few other nonwhite passengers) at the back of the bus, and they started a conversation. The Kenyan man said that he had felt like he didn’t exist at the congress. He felt that other (white) attendees didn’t see him, and there was no eye contact. He asked Sujit: “What’s wrong with me?” He thought that they saw him as being stupid or “a monkey.” He said that white people had made no effort to acknowledge his presence and that he had experienced barriers when he tried to approach people. This man experienced a combination of being minoritized and having less social capital at the event (in the sense of having insufficient previous connections), which affected his networking experience. Being embedded in a smaller group from the outset can help in the process of networking (as in the tour groups we mentioned previously), although it is no guarantee. The Frontrunners course in Denmark is an example of one of these smaller groups, but students from the Global South still felt they were “behind” the Europeans (see Chapter 5). However, they were also able to become well-networked internationally through interactions with deaf guest lecturers and during their study visits and internships.

We noticed that people who have met each other at multiple international deaf events over the years often reminisce about when and where they have met. Doing so, they engage in a mental mapping activity, the creation of a corresponding timeline, and the (re-)production of collective memories. During the writing of this chapter, Annelies and colleague Maartje (also from Belgium) were teaching a 5-day “Dr. Deaf” research methods workshop to 22 deaf academics at Aal folk high school for deaf people in Norway. In the evenings, the group got together to chat, and some people who were previously acquainted would figure out where and when they had met each other for the first time. Sometimes, it was easy to establish this quickly; at other times, people challenged each other’s recollections. Annelies thought she had met Liona, from Germany, when Liona was working on her doctorate in the German town where Annelies worked for a few years. Liona reminded her that they had met years earlier, in India, at Annelies’s wedding: Liona was there with a Brazilian group of friends who were traveling through India, accompanying one who had taken part in Frontrunners 3 with Sujit and had thus been invited to the wedding. Different types of mobility to deaf place-nodes and/or in deaf groups (here: study in a deaf folk high school, a deaf youth camp, visiting a deaf couple’s wedding, tourism as part of a deaf group, staying at a deaf person’s home while going to a deaf-related conference) thus connect deaf people across networks.

In other examples, people realized that they had been at the same event but had not remembered each other, or they remembered (or discovered) other people whose paths had co-converged in various place-nodes. At Aal, Arjun from Nepal and Annelies realized they had taken part in the same youth camp in Dehradun, India, 14 years earlier; they did not remember talking to each other there, but they shared memories of the camp and used the sign names of other attendees to discover shared acquaintances. Indeed, by reminiscing about events (and thus engaging in the exploration of collective memories), people may remember who else was there and mobilize dormant ties. This occurred in Aal when Annelies and Maartje were reminiscing with Marta, a Portuguese woman now living in the Netherlands (where Maartje works), whom they had first met in Vancouver during the 2010 International Congress on the Education of the Deaf (ICED). The three women had been staying at the house of Nigel, a Canadian deaf person who had been Maartje’s classmate at the Centre for Deaf Studies in Bristol; it had been a full house, and Marta remembered that the two other guests had been a British and a Norwegian young deaf man. She then realized that, serendipitously, this Norwegian person happened to be taking a different (noninternational) workshop at Aal folk high school at the same time as Dr. Deaf. When she approached him in the cafeteria, he was not sure that he remembered Maartje and Annelies, but on his phone, he found group photos from that time featuring all of them. Taking and sharing photos is a common activity when people reestablish connections: Annelies, Maartje, and Marta also took a group photo of themselves at Aal to send to Nigel, to show their reunion and to remind him of the time they stayed in his house 12 years before.

It is significant that this activity of reconnecting and reminiscing often happens at, or alongside, place-nodes such as deaf folk high schools, workplaces, or events where the paths of loosely acquainted people can converge. The activity of remembering, digging up photos, reexperiencing and consolidating memories, and making new photos is typical of the process deaf people undergo when developing closer working relationships or friendships over time. People who meet each other only briefly or vaguely may incidentally develop their acquaintances further at some later point, and they may look back to pinpoint a specific event when they became better acquainted or even friends. Shared memories, including recreated memories, are put on a mental map showing where place-nodes and people-nodes have converged.

Conclusion

Recent scholarship in Deaf Studies has considered the ways that social, physical, and virtual infrastructures interact with, shape, and are shaped by deaf people’s communicative and social practices. This work has contributed to conceptual shifts, such as an increased focus on scale and networks, as opposed to a dominant focus on the “deaf community” concept and (the disappearance of) “permanent” deaf spaces like metropolitan deaf clubs and schools. By using the “networks” lens to look at deaf sociality, we rethink the ways in which deaf people connect, make connections, and are interconnected—especially as permanent deaf spaces increasingly give way to, or are complemented by, more ephemeral deaf spaces.

Networks consist of clusters of nodes that get connected via (often weak) ties that act as bridges. Internationally mobile deaf people are nodes that converge in places as people and ideas traverse networks through different routes on different scales. The examples we shared in this chapter show how deaf people build up networks through different types of international mobilities (e.g., education, marriage migration, tourism, and work). These mobilities can lead to each other, can overlap, and can flow into each other, especially in the case of hypermobile individuals. At different stages of their lives, deaf people may circulate in different networks, encompassing different places and spaces; through this, networks expand. Social bonds are continually produced, reproduced, and consumed during events and activities, at specific places, and at points in time. Deaf mega-events manifest as a performance of networking, exemplifying intensified networking during certain times and in certain places. The concept of networks, we believe, allows us to think of people being involved in multiple (deaf and other) collectivities with different rates of overlap.

Networks are scaled: For example, some network clusters are connected to a place (e.g., Gallaudet University, Kakuma Refugee Camp) but also have connections around the globe (e.g., with international alumni and colleagues, with deaf people in refugees’ countries of origin, or with resettled refugees). We have also shown how international mobilities get linked to local mobilities, as within local deaf networks in Bali. Indeed, although networks can exist among people in a village, a nation, or on an international scale, these networks are always connected and overlapping with other networks in the sense of there being bridges between clusters of nodes. There are networks that seem to overlap with others less, however. Some deaf networks may exist mostly, or exclusively, in online spaces, but in this book, we focus on how networks are also spatially bounded and emplaced, focusing on physical places that function as nodes. Still, we have touched on links between offline and online networking in a couple of places in this chapter: the use of hashtags, social media, Couchsurfing websites, and WhatsApp.

Information travels through networks and nodes, as do material resources. We showed that different forms of capital are exchanged in networks (e.g., social and economic; see Chapter 8 for linguistic capital), how people rely on network capital as well as expand it, and that effective use of network capital produces a further increase in network capital. Our emphasis is on networks as existing and maintained ties, and we acknowledge that this risks neglecting (or being less sensitive to) ties that fail are absent, are negative, or break down (Schapendonk, 2015). The networks' approach has been criticized for saying little about the nature or quality of ties between people and places and therefore obliterating power differences (Vertovec, 2003). Networks are not always experienced as connection; they can be associated with disconnection and barriers (Cleall, 2015). We focus on these power differences and the search for spaces of belonging across networks in more depth in Chapters 9 and 10—for example showing that, when a person’s network is limited to a particular area, is not yet built, or is based on acquaintances, this can become a barrier to mobility.

Not only is it the case that networking practices can be unsuccessful but many deaf place-nodes are also precarious. Local and often long-established nodes are often felt to be crumbling in the sense of the closure of deaf schools and the breakdown of the deaf club landscape. Precariousness also manifests in the fact that hubs of sociality are transient or movable. This reality often necessitates active networking by mobile deaf people in new countries. Also, because networks and ties need to be actively maintained and be to some extent reciprocal, networking is not always successful. Networking can be hard work, and it can be performed in vain. There is not always reciprocity in initiating contact, hosting, financial support, or flows of information, to give some examples.

Finally, real places and contexts, linked with each other through time–space compression, are key to translocality as a concept (Low, 2017). Place-nodes like Clin d’Oeil “can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings […] where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself” (Massey, 1994, p. 154; our emphasis). At the same time, when talking about networks, it is important to think about how nodes are localized. Local places matter, even if deaf spaces are temporary and ephemeral. Deaf spaces and people are embedded in the deaf mental map, as are temporal events and collective knowledge, and place-nodes within networks create contact zones where new translocal relationships are formed. When these specific sites are imbued with meaning in deaf networks, they are shaped and/or transformed by their relationships with other sites or spaces. By approaching networks as translocal, we have shown how places become markers for stories and collective memories, and places can be immortalized in certain signs and memories tied to people and events.

1. https://www.bslzone.co.uk/watch/found-deaf-club

2. https://www.bslzone.co.uk/watch/zoom-focus-2014-double-discrimination

3. https://www.bslzone.co.uk/watch/lost-community

4. https://www.bslzone.co.uk/watch/lost-spaces

5. A planned language intended to be used as an international second language, Esperanto is used for the express purpose of crossing linguistic borders without using “national” languages. Thus, the act of using Esperanto is inherently cosmopolitan, because its stated function and aim is to enable international and intercultural exchange. In this, it has obvious parallels with IS, despite the latter having emerged spontaneously (see Chapter 8).

6. The term “pan–Arab Sign Language” is used by Al-Fityani and Padden (2009) to describe the “newly devised sign language which uses vocabulary drawn from different Arab sign languages, including Egyptian Sign Language and Saudi Sign Language” and which is “heavily influenced by LIU [Jordanian Sign Language]” (p. 1).

7. https://twitter.com/SavedByTheSign/status/1543500357736824832

8. https://www.instagram.com/tv/CgLP7tOonu1/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY=