Being Understood: Deaf Interpreters, Embodied Language and Relationality

by Kristin Snoddon

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788921176
Publisher:	Channel View Publications
Publication date:	11/11/2025
Series:	Critical Language and Literacy Studies , #34
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	5.85(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Kristin Snoddon is a Professor in the School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. She is co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Plurilingualism in Deaf Education (with Joanne C. Weber, Multilingual Matters, 2021) and Sign Language Ideologies in Practice (with Annelies Kusters, Mara Green and Erin Moriarty, Mouton De Gruyter, 2020).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction: Understanding, Difference and Relationality in Methodology

Part 1: Linguistic Flourishing

Chapter 1. Being a Deaf Scholar: Writing as Being

Chapter 2. Signing Songs and the Openings of Semiotic Repertoires

Part 2: Deaf Interpreters and Understanding

Chapter 3. Sign Language Ideologies and the Ethics of Relationality

Chapter 4. Brokering Understanding: Deaf Interpreters’ Role and Practice

Part 3: Caribbean Deaf Epistemologies of Language and Understanding

Chapter 5. A Phenomenology of Deaf People’s Experiences of Understanding and Music at Trinidad Carnival

Chapter 6. Toward a Caribbean Deaf Queer Phenomenology

Conclusion

References

Index

Editorial Reviews

What does it mean to be understood as a deaf person? Kristin Snoddon asks from the borderlands of lived experience: deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing people as writers, song signers, interpreters, dancers, musicians. By illuminating deaf worlds of (not) understanding and (not) being understood, layers of alienation and shame are reshaped into sites of linguistic flourishing.

Gabrielle Hodge