Terra followed the research interest: The anthropology of the awkward
Terra started following the work of 9 people.
Terra started following the work of Elise Kramer, University of Chicago, Anthropology.
University of California, Berkeley
Graduate Student, Anthropology
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William F. Hanks
Eve Sweetser Charles Hirschkind |
About
My research is concerned with how social actors establish relations between language, the body, and the physical and social environment, to yield worlds with the appearance of concreteness and naturalness. My dissertation focuses on language and communication practices in a community of people in Seattle, Washington who are born deaf and due to a genetic condition, lose their vision slowly over the course of many years. Since the 1970s, Deaf-Blind people from around the United States have been relocating to Seattle. Now this community, comprised of more than 100 active participants, has its own organizations, a high rate of employment, and emerging linguistic and interactional conventions. Most of its members come from Deaf environments where Visual American Sign Language is used. However, when forms derived from Visual ASL are instantiated in tactile fields of engagement, language-internal relations shift. These shifts are leading to an increasing divergence in the structures of Visual American Sign Language and Tactile American Sign Language. In order to understand the means by which this divergence is taking place, my dissertation research has three foci. First, it describes the contours of the social field of engagement given by the history of the Seattle Deaf-Blind community, including contrastive social positions, forms of authority and legitimation, and the ways that styles, genres, and modes of language-use restrict access to power. Second, it asks how current changes in the social field are leading to the reorganization of the deictic field, including new participant frames, interactional conventions, modes of access, and practices for referring to objects in the immediate environment. Third, it asks how changes in the social and deictic fields are giving rise to new correspondences between linguistic forms, structures, and meanings in Tactile American Sign Language. Ultimately, my aim is to understand how Deaf-Blind people configure relations not only within these fields, but between them to create an inhabitable, tactile life-world.
