Being Understood

Deaf Interpreters, Embodied Language and Relationality

Kristin Snoddon

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781788921169
• eBook ISBN: 9781788921190
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics

Experiences of not understanding and not being understood during interactions are a pervasive aspect of life for many deaf people, so ensuring understanding becomes a moral imperative in deaf worlds and part of deaf ontologies. Through a series of linked applied linguistics studies regarding the primacy of text, signing songs, the mediation practices of deaf interpreters and Caribbean deaf epistemologies of language and understanding, this book outlines theoretical and methodological approaches to analyzing deaf people's experiences of understanding and being understood. These are grounded in a Continental philosophy of language and qualitative methods including autoethnography, interpretative interviews and phenomenology. The book explores issues surrounding linguistic and semiotic repertoires; access and affordances; orientation, sociality and power; and mediated communication. Ultimately, it reveals both the workings of epistemic injustice related to deaf signers and ways of understanding and being understood that extend beyond named languages.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Understanding, Difference and Relationality in Methodology
• Part 1: Linguistic Flourishing
• 1 Being a Deaf Scholar: Writing as Being
• 2 Signing Songs and the Openings of Semiotic Repertoires
• Part 2: Deaf Interpreters and Understanding
• 3 Sign Language Ideologies and the Ethics of Relationality
• 4 Brokering Understanding: Deaf Interpreters’ Role and Practice
• Part 3: Caribbean Deaf Epistemologies of Language and Understanding
• 5 A Phenomenology of Deaf People’s Experiences of Understanding and Music at Trinidad Carnival
• 6 Toward a Caribbean Deaf Queer Phenomenology
• Conclusion
• References