Annelies Kusters

Bio: Annelies Kusters is an academic researcher from Heriot-Watt University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Sign language & Deaf studies. The author has an hindex of 13, co-authored 43 publications receiving 618 citations. Previous affiliations of Annelies Kusters include University of Jyväskylä & Max Planck Society.

Beyond languages, beyond modalities: transforming the study of semiotic repertoires

Abstract: 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 language multilingualism as separate from different strands of multimodality studies. In most multimodality studies, researchers focus on participants using one named spoken language within broader embodied human action. Thus while attending to multimodal communication, they do not attend to multilingual communication. In translanguaging studies the opposite has happened: scholars have attended to multilingual communication without really paying attention to multimodality and simultaneity, and hierarchies within the simultaneous combination of resources. The (socio)linguistics of sign language has paid attention to multimodality but only very recently have started to focus on multilingual contexts where multiple sign and/or multiple spoken languages are used. There is currently little transaction between these areas of research. We argue that the lens of semiotic repertoires enables synergies to be identified and provides a holistic focus on action that is both multilingual and multimodal.

Describe, don’t prescribe. The practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of deaf signers

Abstract: 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 b...

Gesture-based customer interactions: deaf and hearing Mumbaikars’ multimodal and metrolingual practices

Abstract: 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 markets, shops, food joints and public transport in Mumbai. Within gesture-based interactions, people with sensorial asymmetries (i.e. deaf vs. hearing) combined the visual-gestural modality and certain features of the auditory-oral modality, and/or switched between modalities. Interlocutors thus orient towards the ongoing interaction and negotiate the constraints and possibilities imposed not only by different modalities but also by different sensorial access to these modalities.

Deaf Utopias? Reviewing the Sociocultural Literature on the World's ''Martha's Vineyard Situations''

Abstract: 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 communities. Deaf studies researchers have begun the process of "synthesizing" and theorizing this information, and have developed typologies based on "traditional" Western urban Deaf communities. This article critically reviews the existing literature and raises new questions regarding the study and theorizing of such communities.

Innovations in deaf studies: Critically mapping the Field

Abstract: What does it mean to do Deaf Studies and who gets to define the field? What would a truly deafled Deaf Studies look like? What are the research practices of deaf scholars in Deaf Studies, and how do they relate to deaf research participants and communities? What innovations do deaf scholars deem necessary in the field of Deaf Studies? A desire to ask, and to attempt to answer, these questions was a prime motivator for us to start editing this volume and writing this introduction. We do not ask these questions just for the sake of asking them: Our common background at the (now defunct) Centre for Deaf Studies (CDS) at the University of Bristol taught us that “doing Deaf Studies” is an inherently political activity, because of the history of both the field and of deaf communities in general. This legacy of the CDS inspired us as we engaged in developing this long overdue volume.

Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication:

Abstract: but the threat they bring to artistic culture. From his opening mockery of the literary establishment’s tendency to theorize the world in terms of desire or gender to his disapproval of those who venerate art while denying its validity in the same breath, Jonathan Dollimore has created an easily understood, albeit at times too theoretical, synthesis of the literary and the experiential in Sex, Literature and Censorship. His arguments on critical theory do not necessarily reject the concept of theory; rather, he argues that critical theorists should strive to understand the contradictions within our lives and our literature and explore the daemonic power of the subjects that offend our sense of tradition.

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

Abstract: It is ‘the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena’ that Augé attempts to describe. So far, so good, but this is only from Non-places’ back-cover blurb. In fact the book is very disappointing: the author offers a bland narrative of the experience of modern life, for example, on the supermarket: ‘The customer wanders round in silence, reads labels, weighs fruit and vegetables on a machine that gives the price along with the weight, then hands his credit card to a young woman as silent as himself—anyway, not very chatty—who runs each article past the sensor of a decoding machine before checking the validity of the customer’s credit card’ (pp.99–100). He nostalgically contrasts this to some romantic idealization of the (French) past, and mixes it up with what can only be described as pretentious waffle. To be fair, some of the concepts introduced are interesting. Anthropological places are contrasted to spaces; places in turn are contrasted to nonplaces: ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a nonplace’ (pp.77-78). Modernity is contrasted to supermodernity: it is supermodernity which creates non-places, ‘spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places...’ (p.78). For example, ‘in the modernity of the Baudelairean landscape ... everything is combined’, the old and new are interwoven; on the other hand, supermodernity ‘makes the old (history) into a specific spectacle, as it does with all exoticism and all local particularity ... in the non-places of supermodernity, there is always a specific position ... for “curiosities” presented as such’ (p.110). It’s true that airports, supermarkets, new housing estates, suburbs and so on are alienating (non-)places—just listen to Strummer’s lyrics to ‘Lost in the Supermarket’ (The Clash, London Calling, 1979); it is also true that we are forced to spend more and more of our lives in such (non-)places. This is why this little book appeared promising. But the concepts Augé employs are hopelessly inadequate to explain the proliferation and character of these ‘late capitalist phenomena’. The definition, cited above, of place vis-à-vis non-place begs the questions: relational to whom?, concerned with whose history?; whose identity? Augé’s point is, of course, that everywhere 144 Capital & Class #60

Reconceptualizing Praxis: Dare We Embrace McLaren's Critical Pedagogy?@@@Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium

Abstract: * Foreword Sharon Welch. * Introduction: Fashioning Los Olvidados in the Age of Cynical Reason * Writing from the Margins: Geographies of Identity, Pedagogy, and Power with Henry A. Giroux. * Liberatory Politics and Higher Education: A Freirean Perspective * The Ethnographer as Postmodern Flneur: Critical Reflexivity and Posthybridity as Narrative Engagement * Jean Baudrillards Chamber of Horrors: From Marxism to Terrorist Pedagogy with Zeus Leonardo. * Gangsta Pedagogy and Gettoethnicity: The Hip-Hop Nation as Counterpublic Sphere * Global Politics and Local Antagonisms: Research and Practice as Dissent and Possibility with Kris Gutierrez. * Provisional Utopias in a Postcolonial World: An Interview with Peter McLaren Gert Biesta and Siebren Miedema. * Unthinking Whiteness, Rethinking Democracy: Critical Citizenship in Gringolandia * EpilogueBeyond the Threshold of Liberal Pluralism: Toward a Revolutionary Democracy * AfterwordMulticulturalism: The Fracturing of Cultural Souls Donaldo Macedo and Lilia I. Bartolom.