There's a nice little summary piece in USA Today about Gallaudet University's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute. It emphasises entrepreneurship as a solution to the discrimination faced by Deaf people in the jobs market.
“It’s very important that it’s not just deaf people helping deaf people,” Soukup said. “It’s about deaf people making a meaningful contribution to the world, and the world recognizing that.”
Read the whole article here.
This is a lot more interesting than it sounds:
“This study confirms that second-generation deaf children exceed deaf children of hearing parents in terms of cochlear implantation performance. Encouraging deaf children to communicate in sign language from a very early age, before cochlear implantation, appears to improve their ability to learn spoken language after cochlear implantation.”
See?! As illustrated in The Silent Child, and it isn't news, parents are sometimes told that encouraging sign language will adversely effect the development of other languages like spoken English. This is counter-intuitive as much as it is simply and demonstrably wrong, and this paper demonstrates it very elegantly:
“Both groups of children showed auditory and speech development. However, the second-generation deaf children (i.e. deaf children of deaf parents) exceeded the cochlear implantation performance of the deaf children with hearing parents.”
You can access the full journal article here.
Rinkoo Barpaga gave this great talk at the Creative Multilingual Identities Conference in February.
In this presentation, he discusses the different sign languages he knows, the development of Urban Sign Language among ethnic minority deaf people, and language barriers he's encountered. His presentation style is tremendous. I'd love to work with him!
(Thanks to Elvire Roberts for pointing this out.)
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an extremely important and powerful piece of European legislation, which the UK has signed up to but which we appear to be determined to ignore.
The full text of the Convention is here. The Articles clearly referring to sign language are Articles 2, 9, 21, 24, and 30.
It is a legally binding document that defines sign language as a right, and also highlights the need for the eradication of physical, social, financial, political and attitudinal barriers.
There is a protocol, all of which the UK has signed up to.
The flaw, as always, is that it is a legal document that protects oppressed and voiceless people from being kept oppressed and voiceless, but only if those oppressed and voiceless people know about it and have the energy and resources to take their local authority, school, or hospital trust to court in a likely escalating series of hearings.
So the other thing the Deaf Community could do with is legal representation from somebody willing to take such a case on. Do you know of such a person?
Nina Thomas' article in Limping Chicken today is absolutely spot on.
“I worry that people mistake awareness for change. The challenges facing d/Deaf people right now are very complex and the changes needed are serious and important”
She points out that the Monday after The Silent Child won its Oscar, the British government blocked the proposal to teach BSL at GCSE level in schools. It reminded me of an interesting occasion when John Kerry visited Ethiopia, and said in a press conference "we remain committed to our partnership with Ethiopia..." etc. An Ethiopian journalist asked him, "Is it lip-service, or are you seriously concerned...?" Kerry was flustered because in everyday English "serious" really means "not joking". This is interesting linguistically because in East Africa "are you serious" means "are you doing something about this, or is it just words?" It is a clear and I think helpful distinction between words and actions that we should all be very clear about. Radiolab cover this very nicely (no transcript, I'm afraid).
There is a meaningful difference between taking something seriously and acting to fix it, and English and our politics endemically confounds the words with the actions.
Deaf people do not need lip-service. They need a hand.
It's a very boring title, but this is the document that tells the NHS who is and who isn't a BSL Interpreter for health settings.
The whole Specification is right HERE. I found it here. The video above is the first in a playlist of six videos that cover the whole review report (not the actual specification, which I cannot find in BSL. That's a whole other discussion....)
The Specification document, section 7.2, item 31, on page 28, says this:
“Organisations MUST ensure that communication professionals (including British Sign Language interpreters and deafblind manual interpreters) used in health and social care settings have:
Appropriate qualifications; AND
Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) clearance AND
Signed up to a relevant professional code of conduct.”
I have highlighted the right bit in the Specification on this link. So, if your hospital, GP, dentist, midwife whatever provides you with an unqualified signer or anybody who does not meet these criteria, COMPLAIN. Show them this document, show them the right section, and tell them never to do it again. If they make a fuss or blame an agency, complain via the CQC here.
NHS providers have a duty to provide appropriate communication support and this document says what "appropriate" means. Booking through an agency who provides inappropriate interpreters does not discharge their duty under this standard (or in my opinion the Equality Act 2010).
