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FAQ: Finding Spaces to Belong

Finding Spaces to Belong is an hour-long ethnographic documentary film that delves into the lives of four deaf migrants navigating their way in London. From Lenka, a Czech au pair keen on improving her English, to Samba, who was brought over from Sierra Leone at 13 for better education opportunities; from Luis, who traveled from […]


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FAQ: This is IS

“This is IS” is an ethnographic film series created by Annelies Kusters (researcher) and Jorn Rijckaert (camera and editor), consisting of six episodes on the practice and politics of International Sign (IS). It focuses on the uses of International Sign in the context of professional mobility, i.e. how students, teachers, translators, interpreters, performers, presenters, organisers […]


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FAQ: #deaftravel: Deaf Tourism in Bali

#deaftravel: Deaf Tourism in Bali is an ethnographic film that explores the experiences of deaf tourists who visited Bali as solo travelers, in pairs, or in groups, in the summer of 2018. The tourists originated from Europe, the USA, and India. They joined tours guided by two deaf tour guides, Wahyu and Gio, whose quite different […]


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Cultural schemes impact on sign language translation

By: Amandine le Maire, 17th March 2022 On my return from fieldwork at Kakuma Refugee Camp, I began to translate the seven interviews that I had recorded.Converting sign language data to written English is a different process compared to transcribing spoken English into written English. This conversion from sign language to written English implicates translation between […]


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Deaf mobility and immobility: Who travels and where?

Annelies Kusters, Amandine le Maire, Erin Moriarty (11 May 2021) Note: this video was produced for the course “International Connections and International Sign Among Deaf people”, developed by OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University and Gallaudet University. The term “mobility” signals a movement in a physical space which can be on a small scale as simply walking from one […]


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Calibrating deaf cosmopolitanism [without videos]

Note 1: this blog is based on a longer article: “Deaf cosmopolitanism: Calibrating as a moral process – International Journal of Multilingualism” open access here: LINKNote 2: In another version of this same text linked here, a vlog in IS is included and the quotes referred below are included in the form of videos. All videos […]


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Calibrating deaf cosmopolitanism

Erin Moriarty and Annelies Kusters, 28 February 2021 Note 1: this video was produced for the course “International Connections and International Sign Among Deaf people”, developed by OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University and Gallaudet University”.Note 2: this blog is based on a longer article: “Deaf cosmopolitanism: Calibrating as a moral process – International Journal of […]


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