Read on Twitter
#DeafTourism & #EthnographicFilm: a thread on mobile filmmaking as a methodology for linguistic ethnography with signing deaf people, as well as a part of deaf-centric practices in research @MobileDeaf
1/ Film as research methodology enables the collection of multilayered, “thick” data that moves an analysis of deaf languaging practices beyond bounded sign language(s)
2/ Filmmaking allows for movement away from “lingual bias”: the predisposition to treat signing as the primary or sole modality in deaf communication and the exclusive analytical focus on the production of signs and the structure of sign languages
3/ Deaf tourism involves flexible multimodal and multilingual languaging practices and the creation of temporal translanguaging spaces. The use of smartphones to film the emergent and fleeting nature of communicative encounters in deaf tourist mobility = essential methodology
4/ Ethnographic filmmaking in itself is not new but the use of mobile methodology is relatively novel in LEs of SLs 
collection and analysis of data on deaf people’s embodied languaging practices & attendant language ideologies that become apparent during quotidian encounters
collection and analysis of data on deaf people’s embodied languaging practices & attendant language ideologies that become apparent during quotidian encounters
5/ Filming with a smartphone is exceptionally useful for collecting data on languaging practices, especially on the move, as deaf translanguaging practices involve multilayered, embodied, and intuitive visual semiotics
6/ In deaf translanguaging spaces, there is accumulation of new linguistic resources and a rapid expansion of individual and group repertoires to include flexible, shifting use of multimodal communication strategies to achieve mutual understanding
7/ Ex: pointing, gesturing, mouthing, searches on smartphones to show images to illustrate what is meant by a fingerspelled or signed word, or Google Translate for the definition of a word to help envision how to sign a concept in a more iconic way
8/ Film allows for increased transparency in data collection, analysis, and dissemination. Showing the data itself, through a link in an academic article, allows for insight into the researcher’s analysis and interpretation of the data
9/ It also enables insight into the researcher’s competence in sign language(s), which is not often openly discussed in sign language and Deaf Studies research (or anthropology, for that matter. See Gibb and Danero Iglesias 2017 for a great discussion)
10/ Finally and most importantly, filmmaking is a means of making research more transparent, especially for deaf people who may not have access to academic discourse in written English. It can be a strategy for dissemination of research to different signing communities
11/ #DeafTravel ethnographic film, made with Jorn Rijckaert of VisualBox and @ERC_Research funding coming soon!
Link to open access article: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/763669/pdf
