A Kusters
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 16981 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | A Kusters |
| NOMBRES | A |
| APELLIDO | Kusters |
| FIRMA | KUSTERS A |
| AFILIACIONES | Heriot-Watt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5228-7363 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 263 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2010 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
This is our rhythm
Deaf scholars have long worked at the margins of academic institutions not designed for them. Designated deaf academic spaces—where deaf ways of knowing, teaching, and communicating are centered—remain rare. This study explores what becomes possible when such a space exists, presenting Dr Deaf as a case study. Drawing on interviews with participants and teachers, we show how deaf epistemologies and pedagogies are enacted through cross-stage respo…
International Sign
This article explores the nature of International Sign (IS), a linguistic phenomenon emerging from international deaf interactions. It examines various terms such as Gestuno, cross-signing, International Sign, and International Sign Language, revealing differing perspectives on IS as a lexicon, a language, or a dynamic process. The debate on IS's classification draws parallels with contact languages, lingua francas, and national sign languages. T…
More Than Signs
This article makes a case for understanding International Sign (IS) as a distributed practice. IS, a translingual practice, arose from interactions among individuals from diverse linguistic backgrounds, integrating signs from multiple national sign languages and leveraging iconic and transparent features of sign language lexicons and grammars. At the heart of IS is the principle of calibration, an adaptive process aimed at aligning signs to foste…
It is natural, really deaf signing” – script development for fictional programmes involving sign languages
Historically, fictional productions which use sign language have often begun with scripts that use the written version of a spoken language. This can be a challenge for deaf actors as they must translate the written word to a performed sign language text. Here, we explore script development in Small World , a television comedy which attempted to avoid this challenge by using improvisation to create their script. The creators framed this process a…
Emergence and evolutions
The sociolinguistics of sign languages parallels as well as complements the sociolinguistics of spoken languages. All of the key areas of sociolinguistics, such as multilingualism, language contact, variation, and language attitudes-are of immediate relevance to sign languages. At the same time, sign language researchers using a range of data sources and methods (e.g., sign language corpora, linguistic elicitation, and linguistic ethnography) hav…
Introduction
Recent years have seen a revitalisation in the use of Gumperz and Hymes’ notion of the verbal repertoire, meaning ‘the totality of linguistic resources (i.e. including both invariant forms and vari
Deaf cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism theory was mostly developed separately from the study of multilingualism: while language is central to cosmopolitanism as a practice, only a few scholars focusing on cosmopolitanism have taken a language-centred approach. We further theorise the relationship between cosmopolitanism and translingual practice with our focus on morality in relation to the use of the semiotic repertoire. The use of resources of the semiotic repertoire…
Family language policy on holiday
Most FLP research focuses on intrafamily communication (1FLP) and how this is impacted by larger contexts. But what happens when different multilingual families interact intensively on a daily basis? This article analyses language use during a holiday in India in and between four deaf-hearing befriended families, and how this evolved over the twelve days of the trip (4FLP). Three of the four families are our (the authors’) own. The family members…
The tipping point
This paper approaches International Sign (IS) as both a translingual practice and a contact language which is subject to language contact with American Sign Language (ASL). The perceived overuse of ASL in IS is often judged as counterproductive for IS to flourish independently from ASL. The desire for IS and ASL to be sufficiently different leads to a desire for setting and maintaining linguistic boundaries between both. Therefore, discourses abo…
Deaf Anthropology
Deaf anthropology is a field that exists in conversation with but is not reducible to the interdisciplinary field of deaf studies. Deaf anthropology is predicated upon a commitment to understanding deafnesses across time and space while holding on to "deaf" as a category that does something socially, politically, morally, and methodologically. In doing so, deaf anthropology moves beyond compartmentalizing the body, the senses, and disciplinary bo…
One Village, Two Sign Languages
Adamorobe signing is sweet," "The signing in Adamorobe is hard," "Adamorobe's deaf people should sign in an eye-hard way." These are discourses about signing in Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL), a sign language used in Adamorobe, an Akan farmer village in southern Ghana distinguished by a history of hereditary deafness. By calling AdaSL sweet, hard and so on, deaf people in Adamorobe attribute qualia (sensuous qualities which can include hardness,…
Describe, don't prescribe. The practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of deaf signers
In this article we discuss the practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of deaf signers. Applying the translanguaging concept to deaf signers brings a different perspective by focusing on sensorial accessibility. While the sensory orientations of deaf people are at the heart of their translanguaging practices, sensory asymmetries are often not acknowledged in translanguaging theory and research. This has led to a bias in the use of…
Boarding Mumbai trains
This article analyses how intersectionality and mobility shape each other in the case of deaf women who board the Mumbai suburban trains, which have separate compartments reserved for women and for people with disabilities. These compartments being adjacent, deaf women often make last-minute decisions where to board, and even happen to switch compartments at a further station. Here, intersectionality shapes mobility in that it entails a complex a…
Language ideologies on the difference between gesture and sign
Beyond languages, beyond modalities
This paper presents a critical examination of key concepts in the study of (signed and spoken) language and multimodality. It shows how shifts in conceptual understandings of language use, moving from bilingualism to multilingualism and (trans)languaging, have resulted in the revitalisation of the concept of language repertoires. We discuss key assumptions and analytical developments that have shaped the sociolinguistic study of signed and spoken…
Gesture-based customer interactions
The article furthers the study of urban multilingual (i.e. metrolingual) practices, in particular the study of customer interactions, by a focus on the use of gestures in these practices. The article focuses on fluent deaf signers and hearing non-signers in Mumbai who use gestures to communicate with each other, often combined with mouthing, speaking and/or writing in different languages. The data were gathered through linguistic ethnography in m…
Our hands must be connected”
This article is based on the analysis of customer interactions of Pradip, a deafblind man, with street sellers and shopkeepers in Mumbai. Pradip made use of visible and tactile gesturing including pointing at and tapping on objects (to indicate them), using emblematic gestures, and tracing the shape of objects on the hand. The fact that the sensory ecology is not reciprocal for the interlocutors is crucial for our understanding of what interactio…
When transport becomes a destination
This article considers dense social interactions in commuter trains and their crucial role within city-wide networks. Literature on social interactions in public transport has focused on how commuters have short interactions with each other, or constitute groups of train friends, but without situating them in wider geographies. The article focuses on deaf people in the Mumbai metropolis who travel in compartments reserved for disabled people, cha…
Autogestion and competing hierarchies
This article offers a detailed ethnographic account of how people appropriate available space in compartments for disabled people in the Mumbai suburban trains, make it their own and monitor it, in the context of a succession of recent spatial changes. These compartments have increased in size over the years, and subsequently, the body of travellers has become more diverse. Passengers produce hierarchies based on need, physical differences, age d…
Changing the World (or Not)
Peasants, Warriors, and the Streams of Deafness. Language games and etiologies of deafness in Adamorobe, Ghana
Me: Were you born deaf? Kwame Osae: Yes, I was born deaf. Me: How come? You have hearing parents, right? [Being born deaf is usually linked to having deaf parents] Kwame Osae: (slightly confused) I don't know... maybe because of witches. Me: Ama Korkor [Kwame's younger deaf sister] told me that she was born hearing. Kwame Osae: That is not true, we were all born deaf: me, Kofi Pare, Ama Korkor, Yaa Bomo and Yaa Aketewa [i.e. his four younger deaf…
Peasants, Warriors, and the Streams
Ik gebaar, ik leef
Language ideologies in the shared signing community of Adamorobe
This article analyzes language ideologies with regard to sign language in Adamorobe, a "shared signing community" in southern Ghana. Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL) is a "shared sign language," used by all deaf people and a large number of hearing Akan-speaking people. Deaf schoolchildren from Adamorobe attend a school where Ghanaian Sign Language (GSL) is taught. Hearing interviewees have experiential knowledge that everything can be said in Ada…
Understanding Deafhood
The authors argue that Deafhood (a term coined by Dr. Paddy Ladd) is an open-ended concept with an essentialist core. They describe how deaf people who have attended their Deafhood lectures and workshops have perceived different aspects of the Deafhood concept, and compare the basic tenets of Deafhood and criticisms on Deafhood to theories and criticisms on feminist essentialisms. The authors find that the vagueness and wideness of the Deafhood c…
Beyond languages, beyond modalities
This paper presents a critical examination of key concepts in the study of (signed and spoken) language and multimodality. It shows how shifts in conceptual understandings of language use, moving from bilingualism to multilingualism and (trans)languaging, have resulted in the revitalisation of the concept of language repertoires. We discuss key assumptions and analytical developments that have shaped the sociolinguistic study of signed and spoken…
Describe, don't prescribe. The practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of deaf signers
In this article we discuss the practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of deaf signers. Applying the translanguaging concept to deaf signers brings a different perspective by focusing on sensorial accessibility. While the sensory orientations of deaf people are at the heart of their translanguaging practices, sensory asymmetries are often not acknowledged in translanguaging theory and research. This has led to a bias in the use of…
Gesture-based customer interactions
The article furthers the study of urban multilingual (i.e. metrolingual) practices, in particular the study of customer interactions, by a focus on the use of gestures in these practices. The article focuses on fluent deaf signers and hearing non-signers in Mumbai who use gestures to communicate with each other, often combined with mouthing, speaking and/or writing in different languages. The data were gathered through linguistic ethnography in m…
Deaf Anthropology
Deaf anthropology is a field that exists in conversation with but is not reducible to the interdisciplinary field of deaf studies. Deaf anthropology is predicated upon a commitment to understanding deafnesses across time and space while holding on to "deaf" as a category that does something socially, politically, morally, and methodologically. In doing so, deaf anthropology moves beyond compartmentalizing the body, the senses, and disciplinary bo…
Introduction
Recent years have seen a revitalisation in the use of Gumperz and Hymes’ notion of the verbal repertoire, meaning ‘the totality of linguistic resources (i.e. including both invariant forms and vari
Deaf cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism theory was mostly developed separately from the study of multilingualism: while language is central to cosmopolitanism as a practice, only a few scholars focusing on cosmopolitanism have taken a language-centred approach. We further theorise the relationship between cosmopolitanism and translingual practice with our focus on morality in relation to the use of the semiotic repertoire. The use of resources of the semiotic repertoire…
The tipping point
This paper approaches International Sign (IS) as both a translingual practice and a contact language which is subject to language contact with American Sign Language (ASL). The perceived overuse of ASL in IS is often judged as counterproductive for IS to flourish independently from ASL. The desire for IS and ASL to be sufficiently different leads to a desire for setting and maintaining linguistic boundaries between both. Therefore, discourses abo…
Our hands must be connected”
This article is based on the analysis of customer interactions of Pradip, a deafblind man, with street sellers and shopkeepers in Mumbai. Pradip made use of visible and tactile gesturing including pointing at and tapping on objects (to indicate them), using emblematic gestures, and tracing the shape of objects on the hand. The fact that the sensory ecology is not reciprocal for the interlocutors is crucial for our understanding of what interactio…
Emergence and evolutions
The sociolinguistics of sign languages parallels as well as complements the sociolinguistics of spoken languages. All of the key areas of sociolinguistics, such as multilingualism, language contact, variation, and language attitudes-are of immediate relevance to sign languages. At the same time, sign language researchers using a range of data sources and methods (e.g., sign language corpora, linguistic elicitation, and linguistic ethnography) hav…
Language ideologies on the difference between gesture and sign
Boarding Mumbai trains
This article analyses how intersectionality and mobility shape each other in the case of deaf women who board the Mumbai suburban trains, which have separate compartments reserved for women and for people with disabilities. These compartments being adjacent, deaf women often make last-minute decisions where to board, and even happen to switch compartments at a further station. Here, intersectionality shapes mobility in that it entails a complex a…
Language ideologies in the shared signing community of Adamorobe
This article analyzes language ideologies with regard to sign language in Adamorobe, a "shared signing community" in southern Ghana. Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL) is a "shared sign language," used by all deaf people and a large number of hearing Akan-speaking people. Deaf schoolchildren from Adamorobe attend a school where Ghanaian Sign Language (GSL) is taught. Hearing interviewees have experiential knowledge that everything can be said in Ada…
Understanding Deafhood
The authors argue that Deafhood (a term coined by Dr. Paddy Ladd) is an open-ended concept with an essentialist core. They describe how deaf people who have attended their Deafhood lectures and workshops have perceived different aspects of the Deafhood concept, and compare the basic tenets of Deafhood and criticisms on Deafhood to theories and criticisms on feminist essentialisms. The authors find that the vagueness and wideness of the Deafhood c…
Family language policy on holiday
Most FLP research focuses on intrafamily communication (1FLP) and how this is impacted by larger contexts. But what happens when different multilingual families interact intensively on a daily basis? This article analyses language use during a holiday in India in and between four deaf-hearing befriended families, and how this evolved over the twelve days of the trip (4FLP). Three of the four families are our (the authors’) own. The family members…
When transport becomes a destination
This article considers dense social interactions in commuter trains and their crucial role within city-wide networks. Literature on social interactions in public transport has focused on how commuters have short interactions with each other, or constitute groups of train friends, but without situating them in wider geographies. The article focuses on deaf people in the Mumbai metropolis who travel in compartments reserved for disabled people, cha…
One Village, Two Sign Languages
Adamorobe signing is sweet," "The signing in Adamorobe is hard," "Adamorobe's deaf people should sign in an eye-hard way." These are discourses about signing in Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL), a sign language used in Adamorobe, an Akan farmer village in southern Ghana distinguished by a history of hereditary deafness. By calling AdaSL sweet, hard and so on, deaf people in Adamorobe attribute qualia (sensuous qualities which can include hardness,…
Autogestion and competing hierarchies
This article offers a detailed ethnographic account of how people appropriate available space in compartments for disabled people in the Mumbai suburban trains, make it their own and monitor it, in the context of a succession of recent spatial changes. These compartments have increased in size over the years, and subsequently, the body of travellers has become more diverse. Passengers produce hierarchies based on need, physical differences, age d…
It is natural, really deaf signing” – script development for fictional programmes involving sign languages
Historically, fictional productions which use sign language have often begun with scripts that use the written version of a spoken language. This can be a challenge for deaf actors as they must translate the written word to a performed sign language text. Here, we explore script development in Small World , a television comedy which attempted to avoid this challenge by using improvisation to create their script. The creators framed this process a…
Peasants, Warriors, and the Streams
More Than Signs
This article makes a case for understanding International Sign (IS) as a distributed practice. IS, a translingual practice, arose from interactions among individuals from diverse linguistic backgrounds, integrating signs from multiple national sign languages and leveraging iconic and transparent features of sign language lexicons and grammars. At the heart of IS is the principle of calibration, an adaptive process aimed at aligning signs to foste…
"Deaf Utopias? Reviewing the Sociocultural Literature on the World's "Martha's Vineyard Situations
Martha's Vineyard-an island off the East Coast of the United States-is known as a community where "everyone signed" for several hundred years, a utopia in the eyes of many Deaf people. Currently, there exist around the world a number of small similar "shared signing communities," for example, in Mexico, Bali, Israel, and Ghana. A few studies about these have emerged, which give some information about the social and cultural patterns in such commu…
Deaf and Disability Studies
Understanding Deafhood
The authors argue that Deafhood (a term coined by Dr. Paddy Ladd) is an open-ended concept with an essentialist core. They describe how deaf people who have attended their Deafhood lectures and workshops have perceived different aspects of the Deafhood concept, and compare the basic tenets of Deafhood and criticisms on Deafhood to theories and criticisms on feminist essentialisms. The authors find that the vagueness and wideness of the Deafhood c…
Ik gebaar, ik leef
Language ideologies in the shared signing community of Adamorobe
This article analyzes language ideologies with regard to sign language in Adamorobe, a "shared signing community" in southern Ghana. Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL) is a "shared sign language," used by all deaf people and a large number of hearing Akan-speaking people. Deaf schoolchildren from Adamorobe attend a school where Ghanaian Sign Language (GSL) is taught. Hearing interviewees have experiential knowledge that everything can be said in Ada…
Changing the World (or Not)
Peasants, Warriors, and the Streams of Deafness. Language games and etiologies of deafness in Adamorobe, Ghana
Me: Were you born deaf? Kwame Osae: Yes, I was born deaf. Me: How come? You have hearing parents, right? [Being born deaf is usually linked to having deaf parents] Kwame Osae: (slightly confused) I don't know... maybe because of witches. Me: Ama Korkor [Kwame's younger deaf sister] told me that she was born hearing. Kwame Osae: That is not true, we were all born deaf: me, Kofi Pare, Ama Korkor, Yaa Bomo and Yaa Aketewa [i.e. his four younger deaf…
Peasants, Warriors, and the Streams
Beyond languages, beyond modalities
This paper presents a critical examination of key concepts in the study of (signed and spoken) language and multimodality. It shows how shifts in conceptual understandings of language use, moving from bilingualism to multilingualism and (trans)languaging, have resulted in the revitalisation of the concept of language repertoires. We discuss key assumptions and analytical developments that have shaped the sociolinguistic study of signed and spoken…
Gesture-based customer interactions
The article furthers the study of urban multilingual (i.e. metrolingual) practices, in particular the study of customer interactions, by a focus on the use of gestures in these practices. The article focuses on fluent deaf signers and hearing non-signers in Mumbai who use gestures to communicate with each other, often combined with mouthing, speaking and/or writing in different languages. The data were gathered through linguistic ethnography in m…
Our hands must be connected”
This article is based on the analysis of customer interactions of Pradip, a deafblind man, with street sellers and shopkeepers in Mumbai. Pradip made use of visible and tactile gesturing including pointing at and tapping on objects (to indicate them), using emblematic gestures, and tracing the shape of objects on the hand. The fact that the sensory ecology is not reciprocal for the interlocutors is crucial for our understanding of what interactio…
When transport becomes a destination
This article considers dense social interactions in commuter trains and their crucial role within city-wide networks. Literature on social interactions in public transport has focused on how commuters have short interactions with each other, or constitute groups of train friends, but without situating them in wider geographies. The article focuses on deaf people in the Mumbai metropolis who travel in compartments reserved for disabled people, cha…
Autogestion and competing hierarchies
This article offers a detailed ethnographic account of how people appropriate available space in compartments for disabled people in the Mumbai suburban trains, make it their own and monitor it, in the context of a succession of recent spatial changes. These compartments have increased in size over the years, and subsequently, the body of travellers has become more diverse. Passengers produce hierarchies based on need, physical differences, age d…
Language ideologies on the difference between gesture and sign
Describe, don't prescribe. The practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of deaf signers
In this article we discuss the practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of deaf signers. Applying the translanguaging concept to deaf signers brings a different perspective by focusing on sensorial accessibility. While the sensory orientations of deaf people are at the heart of their translanguaging practices, sensory asymmetries are often not acknowledged in translanguaging theory and research. This has led to a bias in the use of…
Boarding Mumbai trains
This article analyses how intersectionality and mobility shape each other in the case of deaf women who board the Mumbai suburban trains, which have separate compartments reserved for women and for people with disabilities. These compartments being adjacent, deaf women often make last-minute decisions where to board, and even happen to switch compartments at a further station. Here, intersectionality shapes mobility in that it entails a complex a…
The tipping point
This paper approaches International Sign (IS) as both a translingual practice and a contact language which is subject to language contact with American Sign Language (ASL). The perceived overuse of ASL in IS is often judged as counterproductive for IS to flourish independently from ASL. The desire for IS and ASL to be sufficiently different leads to a desire for setting and maintaining linguistic boundaries between both. Therefore, discourses abo…
Deaf Anthropology
Deaf anthropology is a field that exists in conversation with but is not reducible to the interdisciplinary field of deaf studies. Deaf anthropology is predicated upon a commitment to understanding deafnesses across time and space while holding on to "deaf" as a category that does something socially, politically, morally, and methodologically. In doing so, deaf anthropology moves beyond compartmentalizing the body, the senses, and disciplinary bo…
One Village, Two Sign Languages
Adamorobe signing is sweet," "The signing in Adamorobe is hard," "Adamorobe's deaf people should sign in an eye-hard way." These are discourses about signing in Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL), a sign language used in Adamorobe, an Akan farmer village in southern Ghana distinguished by a history of hereditary deafness. By calling AdaSL sweet, hard and so on, deaf people in Adamorobe attribute qualia (sensuous qualities which can include hardness,…
Introduction
Recent years have seen a revitalisation in the use of Gumperz and Hymes’ notion of the verbal repertoire, meaning ‘the totality of linguistic resources (i.e. including both invariant forms and vari
Deaf cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism theory was mostly developed separately from the study of multilingualism: while language is central to cosmopolitanism as a practice, only a few scholars focusing on cosmopolitanism have taken a language-centred approach. We further theorise the relationship between cosmopolitanism and translingual practice with our focus on morality in relation to the use of the semiotic repertoire. The use of resources of the semiotic repertoire…
Family language policy on holiday
Most FLP research focuses on intrafamily communication (1FLP) and how this is impacted by larger contexts. But what happens when different multilingual families interact intensively on a daily basis? This article analyses language use during a holiday in India in and between four deaf-hearing befriended families, and how this evolved over the twelve days of the trip (4FLP). Three of the four families are our (the authors’) own. The family members…
It is natural, really deaf signing” – script development for fictional programmes involving sign languages
Historically, fictional productions which use sign language have often begun with scripts that use the written version of a spoken language. This can be a challenge for deaf actors as they must translate the written word to a performed sign language text. Here, we explore script development in Small World , a television comedy which attempted to avoid this challenge by using improvisation to create their script. The creators framed this process a…
Emergence and evolutions
The sociolinguistics of sign languages parallels as well as complements the sociolinguistics of spoken languages. All of the key areas of sociolinguistics, such as multilingualism, language contact, variation, and language attitudes-are of immediate relevance to sign languages. At the same time, sign language researchers using a range of data sources and methods (e.g., sign language corpora, linguistic elicitation, and linguistic ethnography) hav…
International Sign
This article explores the nature of International Sign (IS), a linguistic phenomenon emerging from international deaf interactions. It examines various terms such as Gestuno, cross-signing, International Sign, and International Sign Language, revealing differing perspectives on IS as a lexicon, a language, or a dynamic process. The debate on IS's classification draws parallels with contact languages, lingua francas, and national sign languages. T…
Hearing Impairment and Communication (21 obras) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (17 obras) · Sociology (15 obras) · Linguistics (14 obras) · Psychology (10 obras) · Computer Science (9 obras) · Sign language (9 obras) · History (6 obras) · Mathematics (6 obras) · Multilingual Education and Policy (6 obras)