MobileDeaf at the halfway stage! What the team has been up to: fun facts and updates

By: MobileDeaf team, 9 October 2019 We are now half-way through the 5-year MobileDeaf project, which started 2.5 years ago in April 2017. That means it’s time for an update to outline what we have done until now! We’ll start with some fun facts! ·     In total, we have interviewed 185 people ·     We have written 880 […]


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How much is too much? On the use of ASL signs in International Sign

Annelies Kusters, 12 September 2019 Note: this blog is based on a longer article: “The tipping point: On the use of American Sign Language in International Sign” Language & Communication 75 – open access here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2020.06.004 “There is a lot of ASL in International Sign”, and “That does not look like International Sign to me, […]


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Using language portraits with deaf signers: do’s and don’ts

Note: this is a re-post of a blog that first appeared on Acadeafic.org on 11 May 2019. See this open access article to read more about how we used language portraits: Kusters, Annelies & De Meulder, Maartje (2019). Language Portraits: Investigating Embodied Multilingual and Multimodal Repertoires [65 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 20(3), […]


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What language portraits tell us about the embodied experience of International Sign

by Annelies Kusters, 20 March 2019 See this open access article to read more about how we used language portraits: Kusters, Annelies & De Meulder, Maartje (2019). Language Portraits: Investigating Embodied Multilingual and Multimodal Repertoires [65 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 20(3), Art. 10, http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-20.3.3239. I used language portraits to do research into the […]


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On audio-recorded presentations, Australian accents, and translated deaf selves

By: Annelies Kusters and Jemina Napier, 14 September 2018 Annelies: What do people think when they see a signing person on stage, and hear a simultaneous interpretation? On Thursday 6 September, I gave a keynote presentation at BAAL titled “Sign multilingual and translingual practices and ideologies”. You can find the video here (click CC for subtitles): […]


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Researching language ideologies and attitudes about International Sign

By: Annelies Kusters, 10 July 2018 For a year, I have been doing research on International Sign, more specifically on what people think about International Sign, how people feel about it, how they learned it, and when they use it (or not) and why. Some people have called it a uniquely deaf phenomenon because it […]


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