Reflexivity

…calibrating…
follow-up to UMass Translation Center

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off.

Build your wings on the way down.

~Ray Bradbury

Meaning(s) of Action Research

I got closer to an actual definition during the blog commentary that followed my first talk on paradigm consciousness.  Julian provided a terrific stimulus when he wrote, “I get the feeling you are discussing the research of a system with the consciousness of being within that system.”

What keeps returning to mind is Edwin’s German translation, “All scientific research is action research.”  He utilized one of German’s functional strengths to establish a context of comparison, yet he remained uneasy with the need to invent a new term. I have felt uneasy with de-limiting the notion of ‘research’ only to the scientific, as the broader motivation is to show all uses of language (in any sense, research or everyday living and working) as a force that generates effects. The entire discussion of all the translations has continued to percolate: what do such translational moves accomplish?

Two weeks later (!), I finally had the aha about the meaning of “all research is action research.”  Where we got hung up, I think, is because of the focus on translating, instead of on interpreting. Julian’s insight struck such a responsive chord in me because of the ever-present challenge of distributing one’s attention: if you’re looking to the left, for instance, you simply cannot also see what is happening to your right. In group dynamics, this plays out most starkly at the division between “content” and “process.” The whole notion of paradigm consciousness is to develop the perception to recognize the juxtaposition of different frames and – ideally – begin to learn how to tack back-and-forth among them as suitable for one’s aims.

All research has consequences.

Or, to put it more neutrally: All research has effects. I’m willing to bet (and I invite everyone to try!) that this interpretation of the claim, “all research is action research” is easier to work with, and more clear to convey, than the tight linguistic mapping attempted during the workshop.

I am not forgetting that I offered no help! The honest truth is: I did not yet know – myself – the most concise way to convey the meaning of the claim! And here you see the heart and soul of action research as always-and-forever in motion. This understanding provides the criteria, I believe, to distinguish the essential difference between “translating” and “interpreting.” Translation presumes a static target, and its goal is precision (in the engineering sense). Interpreting, however, presumes a dynamic process (at least relatively so, I know we can quibble!), and thus relies on the possibility of iteration (i.e., turn-taking to build clarification and mutual understanding) in order to generate greater accuracy.

Engineering precision vs engineering accuracy

I am finding the language of engineering quite useful to muddling through some bits of the tangled morass of social theories – be they critical or otherwise.  This site illustrates the distinction between accuracy and precision very well. As interpreters and translators, our goal is to be both accurate and precise, however I suggest that the material with which we work – language – is inherently not amenable to the achievement of both goals, simultaneously. It seems to me that what interpreters do (in the face of uncertainty about a particular meaning in a specific social interaction) is select the highest probability ‘meaning’ for the context of the situation and according to the character (if known) of the speaker. I am not versed enough to know whether translators rely on established discourses to the same extent, but my suspicion is that they do: on what other basis can one decide among the range of potential meanings for any given snippet of text?

My observation is that if you listen carefully to how interpreters and translators talk about our work, it winds up – more often than not – that we privilege precision over accuracy. I would describe this as an empirical feature of our professional discourse. I suspect we do this because it is reassuring to interlocutors, who are generally even less inclined to consider the trajectories of their utterances (written and spoken), if they are even aware of communicating in patterned ways.

And herein lies the power of interpretation and translation: we know these patterns – even if we have yet to figure out the extent of our own participation in them!

Popularity: 1% [?]

UMass Translation Center

I recently gave my first talk on paradigm consciousness. The ideas have been floating in my mind since the spring of 2003, but only in the last few months has the knowledge come together well enough for me to try teaching them. My own mode of learning is through action research, and there actually is a sub-division called action learning, which is how I labeled my methodology after fending off the attacks of my dissertation committee’s self-appointed “bad cop” faculty member during the defense of my research proposal.

My main objective for the presentation was to test a method for raising “paradigm consciousness,” because this is a pre-requisite for understanding what motivates action research. There is a variety of literature about action research, much of which tends to skirt the really hard stuff: like what to do when someone in an organization really does not want to learn, grow, or otherwise be open to, let alone support, dealing with new knowledge. By being transparent about my method, I am attempting a parallel task with social research as Yonjoo advocated when she said that it is not whether a particular translation is “right or wrong,” but that the translator has been conscious enough of making decisions and choices so that “the translation can stand up.”

Producing Research that Stands Up

Most scholars want their research to stand, but how many of us investigate the foundation on which research is supposed to stand? There is a choice between engaging knowledge as based in terms of philosophy (abstract, without application) or based in terms of practice (grounded, with consequences). Action researchers are engaged in practice, and “practice is messy” (personal communication, Dr. Leda Cooks). Applied research is messy because people are messy. No offense to anyone!

In Assault on Reason, Al Gore (2007) explains, “One of the world’s leading neuroscientists, Dr. Vilaynur S. Ramachadran, has written,

Our mental life is governed mainly by a cauldron of emotions, motives and desires which we are barely conscious of, and what we call our unconscious life is usually an elaborate post hoc rationalization of things we really do for other reasons.”

The tension that action research taps derives from fairly modest claims: that

1. meaning is co-constructed in interaction, and that the
2. meaningfulness of interaction (especially at the microsocial level) is malleable by human consciousness.

(If you disagree, let’s get it on!) I use a distinction between “meaning” and “meaningfulness” that tries to distinguish between definitions for words, phrases, behaviors and such that are relatively fixed in social time (the present) and the relationship between this ‘fixity’ and dynamical processes of understandings, disagreements, and other outcomes of communication that occur over time.

My imagination about how the presentation would go is that I would share new information (specifically Burrell & Morgan’s four paradigms of social theory), and create some activities that would make it possible for participants to find ‘where you fit’ in that scheme. I realize some of you rejected the model outright or found it too simplistic, but I am not convinced that the schema is inadequate…? I am quite interested in further engagement on this point! Cris caught my attention with his observation that translation theory in recent years has moved quite far away from the “objective” end of the horizontal axis toward the “subjective” end. We did not get into the details of Burrell & Morgan’s components, but they include individual views on ontology, epistemology, human nature, and methodology along the horizontal axis. Their vertical axis involves views on social cohesiveness and unity (how societies regulate themselves to stay together) and modes of domination and structural contradictions (how individuals strive to overcome structural limitations by inducing radical change).

At any rate, I’d like to reflect upon the notes I scribbled all over the board while we were talking about the challenges of translating the claim:

“All research is action research”

The diversity of languages was pretty exciting in and of itself: Chinese, French, Galician, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. There are different tools one can bring to the service of action research; my primary tool is discourse analysis. So what interested me the most was not the actual translations, but what was said about making the decisions. (The words and phrases I recorded appear mostly in blue, but sometimes black – I wanted more colors, and a few times I was rushing and didn’t switch colors.) This level of discourse (the descriptions, opinions, and judgments) shows what is normative about translation decisions – and these norms and prescriptions bring paradigms into view. In this ‘on-the-spot’ workshop-like situation, unless you were lucky enough to know the equivalent jargon for “all research is action research” in the target language (as happened with Korean), you had to rely on “literal” or “equivalent” words on a term-by-term basis that everyone recognized was probably inadequate. Maria Jose succinctly summarized this choice: “Be literal or guess!”

We spent the most time talking about the Chinese translation because of its idioms and the special way it treats quantities. Also, I admit that I especially enjoyed its artistic quality because of the combination of precision (at the level of semantic meaning) and accuracy (the general aim of what I am reaching toward: interpretation – and action research – as kinds of art). The French version also captures the definition: it was back-translated as, “All research has an element of action.” But – so what?! Does the content knowledge (the “finding” of an acceptable way of saying “all research is action research” in another language) establish the baseline for what matters most in the work of translating and/or interpreting? Is the bottom line always the “non-risky” translation, the one that is confirmed when two or more translators come up with the exact same diction, grammar, verb tenses, and phrasing in the target language?

Work with me here, okay? Let me extrapolate a little bit. The need to know context, relationship, or ‘what comes next’ is about control. Remember the vertical axis of Burrell & Morgan’s paradigm grid: from the sociology of regulation at the bottom to the sociology of radical change at the top? Now, I am not saying interpreters or translators do not need to know context, or that it does not matter whether we do or do not know the terms of engagement. Several of you said you needed to know the context, that you understood there is an implicit movement, even a kind of changeability that comes about because of interaction, because of the implications of engagement and interaction… and I agree in general, but why do you need to know?

In our example, someone explained that the term “action research” is “loose,” it “tends to the subjective,” and “is charged with possible meanings.” Yes, but is it the range that is so problematical, or is it because, as someone else said, the meaning of action research is “more political”? Let me ask, why is this “meaning” – the meaning of this term, this concept – any more, or less, “political” than any other? While acknowledging that you may consider all translation choices political, let me get really crazy and pose a hypothesis: the stakes are higher because claiming an element of action in all research means NO research is without effect. The German translation boldly went all the way, “scientific-research is action-research.” In other words, any and all kinds of research ACTS upon the world, in this or that direction, for this or that purpose, with effects that have material consequences. Good, bad, sloppy, indifferent….. and so it is with language, too, even conservative choices have an effect. If, for instance, the goal of interpretation is to strive to say the most common thing (the non-risky, that which is verified by others), what happens when the interlocutors are not seeking such banality?

goddag yxskaft

What is “the action” of action research? If I’ve done my job well, you are considering paradigms more carefully. This matters, because the way we talk about translation and interpretation shapes what clients expect. I suspect that Members in the European Parliament, for instance, are motivated to use lingua francas partly because they have been consistently disappointed in the measurement of ‘objectivity’ they were taught to expect. It is as if, in the professional desire to reassure clients that we are sticking true to their text, e.g., not changing anything, we wind up contributing to a structure of regulation that minimizes or discounts our labor. If you are happy with this, no problem! But if you are not, the take-away is not to confuse the current lean toward subjectivity as necessarily having anything to do with societal change. This is precisely the point that Loc Pham asked about: can one tread between paradigms? Finding a meaningful answer to that question requires much more attention to the vertical order-conflict axis. As interpreters and translators, we must be able to conceptualize our work in terms of a ratio between supporting the current regulated order and working toward radical change.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Amherst
(23 January 2010)

One Sunday of an unseasonably warm weekend, I hauled out the bicycle and decided to try my luck on the bike trail. Had it been warm enough, for long enough, for all the ice on the densely tree-shrouded path to melt?  No. I approached the first patch with determination, choosing the path of most visible pavement, where the tracks of others had contributed to wearing down the ice. That was a mistake. I did not fall, but the ruts and grooves grabbed the tires, forcing me along channels contrary to my desired direction, threatening to pitch me into the trees.

What to do?

I rode until the next patch of ice and dismounted, walking its expanse, struck by the parallels with writing the dissertation, and especially with the process of negotiating the action research follow-up.  There are so many typical paths of reaction and response, how can I avoid being sucked along a vortex of assumptions that winds up replicating dynamics that have played out before?

It is the dilemma of agency in the face of organization. There are many cross-cutting forces, occurring at nested levels of interaction….is it possible to retain awareness of an alternative chronotope at the crucial moments? Can one dissent from expected norms while maintaining not only personal integrity but also respect for the motivations of others who are doing their jobs as best they understand them? I decided to experiment. What if I ride where others haven’t?

It was tense! I could make headway on the snowy-ice mixture if I focused hard on relaxing. It seemed counter-intuitive, but I trusted what I’ve been learning about physics. The forward momentum had more inertia than the jerks to the front wheel if I could just manage to trust a casual grip on the handlebars, give a bit with each jolt and allow an intuitive sense of balance to keep me upright. As long as I didn’t overreact, or stop paying attention, I could ride over the slippery terrain without resorting to the established routes. But for how long can one avoid pre-grooved channels? It is much easier to manage the calibration when it was just me and the ground! As soon as I encountered other people I chose to dismount; the congestion was too risky – now a fall wouldn’t just hurt me, it could potentially injure others, too.

Call it a chance encounter….

Walking, I meet a physicist and his wife. We chat about bicycle-riding on ice. I’ve been puzzling over the relatively inaccurate diction of social theorists in describing social phenomena.  For instance, “tension.”  I’m guilty of using this word too, don’t we all?!  My suspicion is that the use of this term by engineers (for instance) is much more precise.  Tension involves at least two forces, not just one. What do social theorist mean when they use this term?  Do they have only elongation in mind?  Only compression?  The combination of the two? Have they located the position of either the strain (of elongation) or the stress (of compression)? Is there a particular conceptualization of the relationship, like engineers have with their stress-strain curves? Why are social theorists so sure that the imagery, the meaning, ascribed to labeling something a “tension” is uniformly shared by all readers and writers using it?  The possible variations seem to me quite significant!

“Why do they do that?” the physicist asked me. The only answer I have is that I think there is a general assume of understanding. English speakers, anyway, assume we all mean the same thing, that we are referring to a singular phenomenon with which we are all familiar and agree is unproblematic (in the sense of its labeling).  His wife, however, shared with me the real gem of the day.  Such are the signs by which I decide I’m on a useful investigation!

Harmonia

The original Greek for tension is harmonia, and – get this! – the original definition is not “harmony” (although my quick googling gives this common sense)  but, rather, harmonia refers to the tuning of a lyre to get it to the right pitch. Calibration, baby! I’ll need to learn more about the mathematical application in geometry, particularly this application: “A famous one line argument shows that calibrated p-submanifolds minimize volume within their homology class.”  Part of the argument I’m developing (in my imagination, if not as much on paper, yet!) is that calibrating to timespace influences the use of space and maybe even the shape of place. I am referring directly to Bakhtin’s chronotope, of which I’m unsatisfied with current available explanations on the web but the notes by Taylor Atkins are a decent beginning if you’re unfamiliar with Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel.

Popularity: 3% [?]

A few days before his defense, the very-soon-to-be-Dr. Shiva promised to make his phd defense as incomprehensible to a non-engineer as possible. He was teasing me, but it opens space for me to play with representing his work not only on its own terms, as I have tried to do with other friend's dissertations. In this "Part 1" post, I've selected items from Dr. Shivasubramanian Gopalakrishnan's defense that enable me to play with fluid dynamics as an analogy for language-based communication dynamics. My not-so-hidden-agenda is to attempt a translation between disciplines that might serve as an impetus to potential collaborations for addressing cross-disciplinary problems (the global type, interwoven across institutional fields, such as climate-change, grinding poverty, and widespread starvation, to name a few).

“Modeling of Thermal Non-Equilibrium in Superheated Injector Flows”

Dr Gopalakrishnan’s area of specialization is non-equilibrium phase change operations. The basic phase change he studied for his dissertation involves the change of liquid fuel into gas vapor in automobile and aircraft fuel. There are a whole ton of things that need to happen in order for a fuel to provide adequate power to an engine so that a car or plane can travel, and a fair number of things that can go wrong in the attempt, such as flash boiling and vapor lock. The engineers know all about these problems, but I had to do a bit of research. A liquid boils, for instance, not only as a function of temperature, but also as a function of pressure. Suppose one thought of a linguistic flash boil as the interaction of

a) a word’s definition (its ‘temperature’) and

b) the context in which the word is uttered (the environmental ‘pressure’).

Right word, right context: everybody happy.
Right word, wrong context: problem!
Wrong word, right context: just a goof.
Wrong word, wrong context:
potential domestic disturbance or international incident!

Suppose we were able to slow down social interaction to 2000 frames per second (like this water droplet) in order to perceive how a single word enters language (and thus communication) as a whole?  Most people tend not to think much about the language we use unless/until something goes wrong, and then our energies focus upon repair. If we could cultivate more consciousness about how (for instance) individual word choices merge with larger pools of language use, then we might be able to diagnose discourse patterns and even design ways of communicating that work more efficiently in developing and implementing ideas that solve real-world problems.

In terms of the analogy I’m proposing here, how or when do words conserve mass and momentum without changing the substance or direction of established discourse or social patterns?  When and how might particular words conform to the dictates of conservation while also accomplishing an alteration in substantive conditions that generates new forms of dialogue?

Vapor lock is not such a problem for cars anymore, but it remains a challenge for aircraft. Both issues involve the liquid becoming gas too soon. With flash boiling, part of the liquid fuel – but not all of it – superheats, leading to a two-phase (and thus inefficient) distribution of energy. With vapor lock, the bulk of the liquid vaporizes before practical use – also due to combinations of pressure and temperature. Vapor lock can cause a severe drop or even a complete stall in power. Not what you want to happen at high altitude! Nor in a conversation that you wish to proceed smoothly, for whatever reasons.

Suppose you need to talk with someone who uses a different language than you. A phase change is necessary for communication to occur. Suppose an interpreter (professionally trained, fluent in both languages) is available to transform the ‘fuel’ provided by your language into ‘power’ in the other language? This would be a phase change, yes? Keep in mind that in scientific categorization, liquids and gasses are both fluids – they belong to the same medium. Similarly, English and Turkish, Spanish and Hindi, Malaysian Sign Language and Langue des Signes Française are all examples of the medium of language. The question of efficiency in fluid phase change is comparable to the question of comprehension in interpretation: the challenge is to identify the relevant factors and manipulate the conditions so that the interaction occurs with the least loss. In fluid heat exchange, one considers the

1. rate of downstream atomization, the
2. starting point of the phase change – its location within the nozzle, the
3. extent to which dispersion continues outside of the nozzle, the
4. endpoint of phase change, and (finally) the
5. overall emission characteristics: a comprehensive image, if you will, of what is happening when, where, and how that involves all interacting elements and environmental conditions.

Time

One can surmise that in addition to the environmental conditions of temperature and pressure, timing is crucial for effective fluid dynamic engineering! Time comes first in the list above (rate), requiring us to imagine the complicated system in four dimensions. Temporality is also one of the more obvious constituents of interpretation, as people using interpreters to communicate across language differences often express concern with the amount of time required for the interpreter to process the ‘injection’ before manifesting ‘emissions’. In aircraft, the particular mechanism that Dr Gopalakrishnan studied involved using the fuel system itself “as a heat sink to increase engine performance.”

Paralleling the practical application of a heat sink with interpretation, the question of efficiency involves the extent to which an interpreter dissipates the hot air, absorbing or otherwise deflecting excess energy that distorts the equilibrium of the relational exchange. This cooling effect of the interpreter is not intended to minimize an interlocutor’s intended meaning (a common concern), but rather, to enable the potential energy (one could say, the understanding) to be most efficiently utilized in whatever power application (voice - Blommaert: ‘the capacity for semiotic mobility’ (p. 69)) is called for: a sudden increase in speed (e.g., for emphasis), or a gradual drop in tone (perhaps to shift a debate from argumentation to persuasion).

Dr Gopalakrishnan’s work zeroed in (among other things) on the relationship between pressure and enthalpy. In terms of vaporization, enthalpy is “the energy required to transform a given quantity of a substance into a gas.” For some reason (unknown), the energy required by interpreters to transform language through a similar phase change operation seems expected not to change the substance. Liquid should not become gas! (Despite that they are still both fluids.) Put another way, the diction (discrete word choice) seems expected not to change despite the phase shift from one language to another!  This is akin to expecting, with fuel, that the molecules of the resulting gas would remain exactly the same as the molecules of the original liquid: in which case, no energy would be produced at all, as there would have been no reaction.

Based on everyday experience, language “is incompressible” (as Dr Schmidt teased when I posed my analogy to him), yet – ironically? – there seems to be widespread social conditioning about languages that presumes an interpreter is magically able to perform phase changes (interpreting from one type of language/medium to another type of language/medium) without effects from environmental conditions. Occupational health and safety evaluations, not to mention professional lore and training, reveal that communicators in a cross-language interaction do need to consider

a) the capacity of the interpreter to store extra heat/energy (technically, thermal inertia) generated by interlocutors and

b) the potential for long-term damage to interpreters (and thus, the communication system) by constraints imposed by conditions of ’social temperature’ and ’social pressure’ (which can show up, in fluid dynamic terms, as cavitation).

Often, when the complex realities of language-to-language interpretation are surfaced, the fallback position is to eliminate the need for interpretation. “Get everyone using the same language.” Instead, I want to suggest that there are tremendous benefits to embracing the need for interpretation as an opportunity for highlighting precisely those areas and moments of greatest difference and thus of challenge. When communication appears to fail or feels inadequate, this can be taken as an indicator to those involved that the interaction potential has shifted from a single/shared perspective to a fuller range of views – which, if utilized, may suggest greater/deeper capacities and efficiencies.

One of Dr Gopalakrishnan’s innovations was to apply two different sets of equations to the problem of fuel injection efficiency. By coupling mechanisms that perform distinct tasks in different domains, Dr Gopalakrishnan was able to generate new knowledge about the overall process which will likely lead to improvements in efficiency. In a similar spirit, I seek to draw on (admittedly limited) paradigmatic knowledge from engineering about fluids with paradigmatic knowledge from the humanities about language. This task necessarily involves translation between the two disciplinary languages. To be successful, co-learners will have to want to make the effort to move beyond disciplinary monolingualism. I hope the compelling problems of our time provide sufficient motivation for trying to bridge the segregation.

In a way, interpreters are always trying to apply “two different sets of equations” to the problem of efficient communication. These are the ‘equations’ of culture and language particular to each communicator. The unique aspect of interpreting (as a complex system involving the rapid combination of distinct tasks across domains with an ever-changing mix of elements), is that the people involved also have power to interpret – and re-interpret – the conditions. Unlike fluid dynamics, where the ‘temperature’ and ‘pressure’ are given factors of the environment (fixed, stable, presumedly controlled/controllable), individuals in a communication process can always choose to maintain or change the context: to alleviate or increase the pressure, to drop or raise the temperature, to decide that any word – ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ even if it generates vapor lock or superheating – can be worked with and turned to productive use. This takes effort, of course, and requires collaboration – therein lies the rub!

Coming up in Part 2: the challenge to traditional models of superheating fluids that only consider instability-based modes of breakup, the question of size vs quantity, and void fractions.

Popularity: 34% [?]

The quote above is from a comment by blenCOWe to a blogpost, Theory of International Politics and Zombies, by Daniel W. Drezner. Drezner’s blog entry is an example along the lines of this youtube video, Gay Science Isolates the Christian Gene, and a powerpoint presentation made by MJ Bienvenu at the recent biennial convention of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, in which she offered deconstructions of audism from the organization’s official website. For example:

The pedagogy of this style of teaching is aptly captured by Erin in her comment to Drezner:

“As Daniel Nexon and Iver Neumann write, “The mirror approach is broader than simply deploying popular culture artifacts as a teaching aid. IR scholars can examine popular culture as a medium for exploring theoretical concepts, dilemmas of foreign policy, and the like.” (12).”

The mirror approach operates on the simple principle of substitution: take an existing discourse, and

a) reverse the key tropes (as in “Gay Science” or unveiling audism in “The Heart of the RID Organization”),

b) replace the key actors with an abstraction, or

c) combine both.

A View from Communication Theory
The engagement spawned (ha) is impressive. A communication theorist has many choices for analysis: as a media text, from the viewpoint of audience, in terms of effects, as a language game (Wittgenstein), as a social use of information and communications technology, not to mention the rich data seeded throughout regarding regional, national, and gendered points of view (classist, ableist, etc), and the production of online identities. It can be critiqued from a variety of viewpoints, including (for instance) political economy, pragmatism, or cultural studies, and at differing levels, such as mass media or interpersonal communication.
My own take is to regard the entry and comments as an instance of discourse: academic, specific to one discipline, and (probably, as goes the zeitgeist) rooted more in space than time. The use of wit (humor) to display breadth, depth, and precision of one’s knowledge in fast repartee is the most valorized contemporary mode of intellectual engagement. Everyone who can find a way in, does, and those who can’t find their way quickly enough, don’t. By the time the entry point clarifies into a path (or the perceptible path finds its entry point), the exchange is over, the event is closed. The instigators and participants have moved on to the next sexy thing. The normative behavior is that the immediate “space” occupied by this interaction has been effectively controlled: everyone (who matters?) has had their say in shining flashes of inspiration.
What strikes me, as an action researcher and a constructivist, is multileveled. First, unadulterated admiration. I envy the lightening comprehension and instant formulation of coherent, contextualized, educative information. Second, awe. We know so much. Ok, so I’m liberally folding myself into the “we,” but seriously: look at the range of knowledge pouring out! It isn’t as if there aren’t tons of “us” out here who understand the historical momentum of the social forces we’re working with – or against, as the case may be. blenCOWe continues:

In terms of his liberal institutionalist and constructivist analyses, Drezner is counting on the fact that the zombies would have the cognitive ability to calculate the benefits and drawbacks to collaborating with other actors. As such, any ideas of building an international organization, including the presence of zombies, to deal with the presence of zombies or to build a world state inclusive of zombies appears to be quite impossible.

Lastly, when he addresses neoconservatism he recognizes that the zombie threat was an existential threat, noting that the threat from zombies is from their jealously over our freedom and not from their desire for our brains. Like the faults with the other theories, this analysis is based on the faulty assumption that zombies have the ability to make cognitive decisions like that. The unavoidable fact is simple, zombies pose a threat to humans because of their desire for brains and for no other reason.

Zombies pose a threat not only because of their desire for eating brains, but – crucially – because that primal desire is coupled with an accompanying lack of brains. The implicit message in the IR discourse about Zombies is that there are, already, zombies among us. I suggest there are three broad types:

• the undead who have accepted a singular social and ideological “programming” as the one and only way to make sense of their lives,
• the undead who have embraced a particular intellectual framework in order to cope with existential anxiety and/or the evolutionary pressures of anarchy, and
• the undead who have selected to master the terms of the zeigeist, “Let’s get cynical!”

Now what?
With the “what” of varying ideological understandings so thoroughly grasped in the space of two days’ interaction, enter the dimension of time. I’m speaking of deep time (esp. deep history), small time (i.e., Bakhtin), and time inclusive of the future. Politically, time is apprehendible in norms of culture and forms of institutions. Simply, what changes and what stays the same? As the Human versus Zombie IR debate unfolds, applications are posed or elaborated, such as two-level game theory and accepting Zombies as a new class to be integrated into the existing global structure. Erin, quoted above, offered

“a brief survey (n=3) I conducted in the last 5 minutes unanimously suggest[ing] that zombies should probably be considered alongside Kosovo to understand IR theory.”

She also adds “an important caveat,” to her random sampling:

“…2/3 of respondents volunteered that they conditioned their response on zombie attacks, unlike extraterrestrial visitations, remaining confined to the realm of hypothetical thought experiments.”

While I agree with the pedagogical impulse, the effect of continuing to deploy only such discrete strategies extends temporally into the future, replicating the same momentum of monological thought that substantively prevents us from finding collective means for creatively managing the diversity of human ways of being. In other words, will the brilliance of insight and potential demonstrated by Drezner & Company be translated into wisdom with a voice?
Engaging intellectual battle in the abstract can be deeply satisfying and even entertaining, the case of Zombies in point. But what about those of us who don’t speak that language? Why must we continue to demarcate the differences in such ways as to reinforce the space of separation between them? This is an illness of extreme disciplinarity. There will always be gaps. Can we ply them creatively? To do so, I suggest we need to consider multilingual models, in particular the potential of interpreted interactions. In The Language Barrier as an Aid to Communication, Rodrigo Ribeiro argues the importance of not understanding in a case study involving the steel industry, technology transfer, and Japanese and Brazilian forms of life

the ‘language barrier’, which is normally thought as a problem, can aid communication by preventing people who hold potentially clashing concepts, beliefs and customs from directly confronting each other.

While I support Ribeiro’s conclusion of value based on non-confrontation and interpreters’ strategies of mediation, I suggest this is only one manifestation of the intercultural communication practice of multilingual/interpreted interaction. The Japanese and Brazilian interlocutors are learning – through this process – how to be with difference. What we academics need to help politicians create are systems that can deal fluidly with difference – ideological, linguistic, cultural, etc – that are, in essence, multilogical rather than monological. Among the strategies that could work are finding ways among ourselves to communicate with each other across, among, and between our fields of expertise.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Building on the potential for a paradigm shift is matter of recognition, marketing, and design. These processes can proactively influence each other, interacting and changing through the development of a project. All are contained within the conception and application of strategic planning.
Strategy has to involve conceptualizing the outcome in two different yet complementary ways. First, you must imagine what you want in terms of place. In the case of the next national conference of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID, US-based), the physical location will be some hotel in Atlanta, GA, but the more important issue is how the space of the place will be designed and implemented in order to generate the desired kinds of intercultural interaction. The second dimension that must be considered is time. By time, I do not mean the logistics of scheduling or considerations about the length of the event or even its parts. These are obviously important logistical factors that require detailed attention. However, the most important temporal factor to consider is how the conference contributes to long-term patterning of habits and attitudes for engaging in intercultural social interaction.

Not Even Related to a Deaf Adult: Buffered by Monolingualism
That would be me, and we NERDAs compose the largest percentage of the membership of RID. Most of us do not understand what it means to be Deaf. We want to understand, and we sure try hard, but our reality as native, hearing speakers of English in the United States is one of extreme linguistic privilege. No matter what other oppressions we may experience, we communicate with the same language as nearly everyone one else around us. NERDAs need to understand that we are affected by living in a society that has done more, historically, than any other country to enforce monolingualism. Unless you live or work in a dense urban city, it is quite possible that you never hear another language spoken in day-to-day living. Most Americans are protected from exposure to even tasting what it might be like to not know the language that would enable you to talk with your neighbor, your child’s teacher, shopkeepers and salespeople, peers in your classroom or a club, not to mention the doctor, police officer, realtor, banker, or the waitstaff at a restaurant where you must guarantee that there are no nuts or shellfish in the dish you want because you don’t want to risk anaphylactic shock.
NERDAs certainly cannot conceive of the intrapersonal, deliberate, conscious planning necessary to predict when and where and for how long we’ll need an interpreter, do not know the calculus of deciding why and for what reasons we’ll need an interpreter, and never have to weigh the costs – time, focused mental energy, unpredictable emotional surges – that come along with deciding, “Yes, in this situation I do need an interpreter,” or “No, in this situation I can manage without an interpreter.” Nor do we have to deal with the fallout from misjudging any of these factors: such as discovering an interpreter is necessary when it had not seemed so, or that the need is much longer/shorter than anticipated, or that the whole effort was a complete waste of time.

Atlanta 2011: Experimenting with New Norms
National conferences of professional associations occur for very specific reasons:

• to further the organization’s business and
• to provide members with professional development opportunities that are not available at home.

A critique offered by one of the other participants in the small group DEAF-FRIENDLY brainstorming sessions (described in the August 9 entry, “Embrace Change, Honor Tradition (RID 2009)” was that the conference focuses too much on training. In the immediate moment, I was most aware of the turn-taking dynamic – how her comment did not have any relation to mine – but I soon realized that her observation is significant. Why are we designing the national conference like an extension of an interpreter training program? Granted, many RID members are still in the early phases of their professional careers, but if we design the conference with students in mind, we generate a comfortable and familiar container for learning as usual.

No wonder, then, that many interpreters arrive and proceed to engage in comfortable, familiar, and usual ways! An alternative would be to take MJ Bienvenu’s deconstruction by reversal to the extreme. This would create a professional development experience that would use the capacities of our national organization to the fullest potential. We already have the technology:

• knowledge of Deaf culture
• linguistic fluency in ASL and English
• professionally trained ASL-English interpreters
• extensive experience with interpreter request systems and accommodation services…

What we need is the will to apply the tools in an altered configuration, and a rationale to convince people to come.

A one-time experiment of mutual discovery
Instead of following the dominant, inherently oppressive model (accessibility provided for the Deaf), we reverse it (accessibility provided for the Hearing). This would generate an experience like none other. In some respects it would resemble an ASL Immersion retreat, and in some respects it would resemble the environment at residential schools for the Deaf. What it would offer is the intellectual and empathy-building experience of being the one who has to ask.
There would not need to be any commitment or promise to continue: we can see what happens, evaluate it, and then decide. If the storming phase re-emerges – so be it, that will be an honest, deep indicator of the organization’s developmental status. If we do establish a foundation for new norms, well, that will be incredibly exciting and everyone who attends will have bragging rights for the rest of their life:

Popularity: 10% [?]

Before I get all dreamy-eyed about the potential for the Deaf community and sign language interpreters to make a significant contribution to global linguistic equality and transnational social justice (see yesterday’s entry), we have some business to clean up.


Nothing written here should be taken as legal advice. I am not a lawyer – not even a legal interpreter. What I write is only my attempt to make sense of this messy situation for myself.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Officer Jay Keithley told a room crammed full of interpreters, “you don’t want to be on the wrong side of the issue.” It was the second information meeting he held during the conference of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf. The room was inadequate for the 100 or so interested interpreters. Squeezing the chairs together, lining the walls, and sitting on all available floor space still left people overflowing into the hallway. Some were repeats, they had attended the first session (two days previous) and returned again, hoping for more clarity concerning liability and the definition of fraudulent behavior.

My motivation to attend was academic curiosity about criminal behavior in telecommunications (I am earning a phd in Communication); I was not prepared for the size of the crowd nor its unmasked anxiety. The sense I received from the palpable concern of interpreters who do work for a VRS company is that there seems to be a significant grey area of calls being made with questionable communicative content.

The Charges: Public Corruption & Fraud (someone got greedy)
The apparently violated law is a general conspiracy law, Conspiracy to Defraud the United States (Title 18, United States Code, Section 371), in which the accused “…unlawfully, knowingly, and intentionally combined and conspired with others to defraud the Federal Communications Commission and its agent, the National Exchange Carrier Association” (p. 2, Affidavit and Arrest Warrant). The National Exchange Carrier Association (NECA) receives regulatory fees from telecommunications companies’ entire customer base, and pays back (technically, “reimburses”) the VRS sub-division or subcontractor or independent provider based on minutes-per-month of (what they call, sic) “online video translation.”
The Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Federal Communications Commission (together, the FCC-OIG) noticed “a dramatic increase in the reimbursements” over the past four years. The increase in minutes used in January 2005 (1.4 million) to January 2009 (8.1 million) is 578%. (Check my math; this is an incredible percentage.) The difference in dollars is staggering: from $10.8 million (January 2005) to $51.2 million (January 2009) – $40.4 million dollars. Yep, if I had been anywhere near anything this big and illegal I would be quaking in my shoes too. What isn’t known (or at least, what is not shared in the legal documents), is how much of the increase is legitimate due to the Deaf community’s learning curve with the technology:

1. becoming comfortable with using it,
2. expanding the circle of family, friends, and work-related calls, and
3. realizing its capabilities in making general content from the internet accessible.

Personally, I would not be inclined to underestimate how eager the Deaf community is to access the wide world of information available so suddenly and – finally! – easily.

The Crime: generating minutes without providing interpretation – from China!?!
Nested down through two layers of companies and three contracts, a particular VRS provider in Texas, Mascom, “processed a large number of VRS calls from callers who specifically requested that no translation [sic] be done, or to numbers that required no translation [sic]” (p. 6, Affidavit and Arrest Warrant). The internal jargon used by VRS interpreters, as reported in the Affidavit and Arrest Warrant to describe “calls with no apparent legitimate purpose” is ‘run calls’ or callers’ ‘running calls’” (p. 6). Examples given include

• calls to lengthy podcasts that are not interpreted,
• calls to numbers where the caller is “put…on interminable hold,”
• calls when both the caller and the interpreter use what is called a “privacy screen” to block the incoming view (so neither can see the other and interpretation is impossible), and
• VRS interpreters calling themselves.

Interesting, the American Deaf community does not seem to be the main culprit (at least, not in this first big case). Records show that “there are hundreds of hours of billed calls that originate with Chinese IP addresses” (p. 6). (An IP address identifies the specific computer used by the caller making the call.) This particular Affidavit and Arrest Warrant approximates that 75% of the total 605,000 minutes billed by (and apparently paid to) the owner of the Texas company (Mascom), Kim E. Hawkins, were run calls. That’s 453,750 minutes of the 6.7 million minute increase from 2005-2009: a mere drop in the bucket.
The information quoted in this blogpost is specific to the Texas case; a similar case has been discovered in Florida. Are there other run call scams going on out there? That is the reason why (in my opinion) the FCC made a showing at the RID convention: to rattle the cage and shake them loose. Officer Keithley explained how unusual it is for such an informational meeting to occur during an ongoing investigation; most questions of substance he had to duck or avoid because they related too closely to the details of the existing and ongoing investigation.

Coming Clean versus Hoping to Not Be Noticed?
To date, I have not worked for a Video Relay Service provider of interpretation services between spoken and signed languages. To a certain extent, my ignorance of the conditions of work and types of calls puts me in a similar ‘outsider’ position as the investigating officers from the FBI and FCC. I can understand their reluctance to specify which types of calls are fraudulent and which are legitimate – because who knows how creative people can be when they are deeply familiar with a system and want to take advantage of it. Still, there seems to me to be a very basic boundary: either your hands are up (interpreting), or your hands are idle. If you’ve been in situations that seem like running calls, then part of what needs to occur is a serious study and definition of what is a reasonable wait time (god only knows how long it can take to navigate automated menus) and what are expected/common conditions in which waiting makes sense (blowing one’s nose, for instance, or going to refill a cup of tea, or taking another call). Some parity needs to be established between the freedoms non-deaf speaking people have for putting each other on hold (in monolingual situations) and the freedom of Deaf signing people to adhere to common norms (in multilingual situations).
The ethics of confidentiality, specifically when/where & with whom the lines are drawn, is another arena opened up for clarification by such overt criminal behavior. The immediate suggestion from Officer Keithley is

“if you see this kind of conduct, report it to your managers, and report to the FCC’s Office of Inspector General at hotline@fcc.gov” or to jay.keithley@fcc.gov himself.

They will protect your anonymity to the extent possible within “law enforcement purposes.” This guarantee is a bit plastic (for instance, you may be identified as a potential witness) but the interpreters who cooperated in the Texas investigation into Mascom are not named in the Affidavit or Arrest Warrant. Their anonymity appears to be protected to the extent that they serve “as a source of information for law enforcement officials” and (presumedly, although this was not stated) are innocent of “knowingly and intentionally” breaking the law. If you were stupid and got caught up in this before you realized how wrong it is, well, its time for another roll of the dice.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Time and Timing: Preparation is Key
The list of ideas and suggestions offered in the DEAF-FRIENDLY workshop (described in yesterday’s entry) ranged from the general:

• emphasize the visual
• always use ASL

to the specific:

• use an FM Loop to mark off the area where sign-to-voice interpretation will be provided
• fine people a dollar for speaking instead of signing
• draw a blue line to mark Signing Zones from Speaking Zones

As I watched, two things came together in my head, one being that we all know what needs to be done. The other was an idea inspired by the way MJ Bienvenu made her points about audism by flipping the subject or object of particular sentences from an identity/logic center based on being “hearing” (not Deaf) to its mirror image presented from a Deaf-centric worldview.

I mentioned laziness concerning the ASL Zone on the third day of the conference, and have to confess that the admission did not serve to improve my commitment to only signing. I appreciated the man in the DEAF-FRIENDLY workshop who talked about being naturally drawn to hearing-and-speaking, but I cringed a bit at the guy who used the example of carrying a beverage in one hand and a suitcase in another – as if that is the common instance which Deaf people are concerned by. Not. I rehearsed my reasons for not always signing:

• I was in Europe and away from ASL for nearly a year,
• my ideas are often not clear (even to myself, shhh!) until I try to articulate them,
• spoken English is my native language so I can say what I mean more easily than I can sign what I mean,
• my eyes get tired and my brain shuts down,
• etcetera.

No matter how hard I seek to justify them, these are all just excuses for continuing to exercise privilege. Betty Colonomos mentioned the United States being “such a monolingual country.” I agree with her: insisting on spoken English when Deaf people are present is the cultural celebration of English (only). The ease with which we slide into speech, and the raft of rationales we create to protect our own linguistic comfort are indicators of resistance to equality.

But here’s the rub. While many of us knew (or sensed, or learned along the way) that we ought to be signing, the formal marketing of the conference does not make this requirement clear. So what happens is that people arrive with expectations (conscious and latent) that are either contradicted or fulfilled and then they react based on how well the actual interactions “fit” with those expectations (which they may not have even realized were ‘there’ until something triggers them into awareness). Suddenly, disappointment and disapproval become evident, and people are thrust into the position of needing to process the fact that their expectations have somehow/suddenly come into conflict with others’ expectations. Affinity groups form along ideological lines, such as the culturally Deaf and their Allies “versus” the Hearing people whose comfort level in ASL is markedly less than their comfort level in English and their friends. Other identity-based groups usually also solidify around their respective centers, and solo outliers who don’t perceive any place where they belong either observe, reserving their insights for themselves, or choose not to participate at all.
In contrast with what I’ve observed (and participated in) previously, these divisions arose rather gently at the end of this conference. I consider this a tribute to two temporal factors: one immediate and one developmental. As frustrated as Deaf people were with the less-than-ideal communication environment, the atmosphere did not become hostile. As defensive as Hearing people were about being called out for speaking instead of signing, they also did not resort to blaming or other forms of reactionary guilt. I suggest that this particular climate was created by President Moose and the Board’s leadership in establishing their own principled protocol to communicate in ASL. As leaders, they set and held the bar in the Here-and-Now.
Stages of Group Development
In human interaction, there are always many things happening at the same time. This is the reason why the most popular answer of interpreter-trainers to the questions, “What would you do?” or “What does it mean?” is: “It depends.” The “it” could hinge on which interlocutor’s perspective you take, which outcome you hope to achieve, the significance of affect in the specific utterance, how this situation fits within the shared history of interlocutors, whether the interlocutors will interact again in the future or not, and so on. The point is simply that no communication ever occurs in a vacuum – every utterance and act of silence is situated in space (here or there) and time (past, present, future).
Imagine RID as a group (of the type called an organization) constituted by criteria distinguishing who is a member and who is not. The histories about the organization show two clear phases identified by Lou Fant as the moment when membership shifted from cultural insiders and close friends of the Deaf to a larger population requiring acculturation and accommodation. Looked at historically (over the long term), these two phases correspond, roughly, with the first two stages of group development as identified by U.S. and British social science researchers in the 1940s and ’50s. Much later, simple labels were applied as a shorthand way of referring to patterns of behavior and issues evident in each stage:

• forming (when people come together and begin to get organized as a group), and
• storming (when the various interests and ambitions of members emerge).

It was helpful for me to realize that I entered the profession (in 1993) well into the era of the storm. And MJ’s experience – arriving on the scene a decade earlier – probably was one of the first public markers that the first forming stage was really over: under other circumstances (a different space) and another time, her interventions would not have generated so much passion on either ’side.’ As it was, asking for recognition of ASL and, later, for an end to a particular performance took on iconic status as events around which people’s interests became plain (whether they wanted them to be so apparent or not).

A possibility began dancing in my mind as I’ve sought to synthesize ‘all the things going on during the conference week’: specifically, the clash of generations (older-younger), the effects & potentials of communications technology, and what I know about the next stage of group development: norming.
I wonder if we might actually be ready for a paradigm shift . . .

Popularity: 3% [?]

It was a well-chosen theme for the 24th national conference of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, although one requires knowledge of the organization’s history in order to be able to fully appreciate the dual challenge of embracing change and honoring tradition. Depending upon point-of-view and experiences, any given change can be viewed negatively or positively, and tradition can be variously described. President Cheryl Moose (pictured, watching (”listening”) during the DEAF FRIENDLY workshop) interpreted the motto for us in her speech at the Opening Ceremony, using an ASL sign for “embrace” that indicates taking a thing from outside of yourself and tucking it into the front pocket of your heart. The ASL sign that she preferred for “honor” is the sign usually glossed as CHERISH. The thing is, if you are relatively new to the field or have only attended a few conferences or less, then you have no way to assess what is traditional or what constitutes change.
The history lessons came at the end of the conference, during a workshop by MJ Bienvenu (The Heart of RID), the Closing Ceremony (RID – The Musical), and a strategy session on making the organization – and particularly the next conference – more DEAF-FRIENDLY. These three events exposed longterm (historical) dynamics, which (especially if taken together) drew out current group tensions. Beyond the quantitative indicators of growth, there are qualitative indicators of change – and resistance to change! – showing which tensions are shaping group development now. If one can get some intellectual distance, our own topics of conversation and modes of interacting provide us with the means to measure how much we have grown (individually and collectively) in dealing with them.
Stuck in the Past?
Maria Ruiz-Williams and Amie Seiberlich presented a “musically inspired ASL storytelling” (see Sherry Hicks) performance of Lou Fant’s Silver Threads: a personal look at the first 25 years of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf. I do not know if it was by plan or coincidence that MJ Bienvenu’s history from 1983-1991 fit so closely with Fant’s timeframe (1964-1989), but the selections presented by Ruiz-Williams and Seiberlich in their interpretation provide a contextualization that could serve as organizational background in which to understand how and why MJ was so shocked by the organization’s resistance (in 1983) to her initiative requesting official recognition of ASL. She was not born radical, she was made to appear radical by the intransigence of people reluctant to share power.
The change to celebrate is that MJ was personally invited by the President of RID, key board members, and Deaf advisors to deconstruct any lingering audism evident in the organization. MJ delivered with surgical precision, using RID’s official webpages to hold up a mirror to the deep audist roots still evident to anyone who knows how to recognize them. An equivalent would be if, for instance, the Interpreting Directorate at the European Parliament invited advocates for linguistic equality from the new languages to publicly critique inadequacies in the delivery of interpreting services for the institution as a whole. Another change evident this year at RID is the standing ovation MJ received for the information and her courage, returning to Philadelphia (the scene of a media-sensationalized event in the early ’90s concerning interpreted music), and persisting in her educational efforts to engage a large population of very slow learners.
What has not changed is the resistance to being an ASL-based organization. This is a kind of “tradition” that we could probably do without, if us hearing people could come to recognize the many ways we play into the linguistic hegemony of spoken English. What I wonder, though, is the extent to which hearing (non-deaf) resistance to immersion in visual communication is coupled – dynamically – with a kind of Deaf kneejerk reaction against even the hint of music? I agree it was too much to have the Opening Reception and the Closing Ceremony both rely on interpreted song, but – especially for the Closing Ceremony – the point was the history, the music was incidental. I wonder two things about the displays of anger and disappointment that I witnessed among some audience members during the RID Musical performance that were repeated during the DEAF-FRIENDLY workshop. “No one stopped it,” one person said, “but they should have.” First, it seems important to ask, how much is this resistance simply generational? Is the older Deaf activist core passing on a prejudice? I realize that Sean Forbes’ capital-D Deaf cred may be questioned, but I would be stunned if anyone doubts Rosa Lee’s. I am not aware of any young Deaf people who were upset by either performance at RID (which doesn’t mean that they weren’t, but I did not witness it). The second hypothesis involves a variation of struggle between the culturally Deaf and the Hard-of-Hearing (which, audiologically, includes both capital-D, culturally Deaf, like children of Deaf parents who learned ASL as their native language, and the audiologically deaf, for whatever reason and from non-deaf as well as deaf origins).
At any rate, the new potentials of communications technology open up so many possibilities that it does seem like it would not beyond conception to generate forms of entertainment that are visually-based and reflective of traditional internal Deaf cultural aesthetics.
RID Conferences as A Professional Development Experience:
Janis Cole and Lewis Merkin facilitated the DEAF-FRIENDLY workshop, which I participated in with a mix of pride and dismay. I’m old enough, and been around long enough, to be able to recognize my younger self in some of the new interpreters. Of the more than sixty people who stayed, I recognized somewhat less than a third, a comforting familiarity (we’re still in this together), but because the numbers were skewed to newer/younger members the discussion went that way, too. The beautifully-orchestrated beginning to a short de-briefing of the conference experience transformed quickly into a venue for diagnosis and performance for a specific demographic: white hearing women. As I watched one after another raise their hand to be called upon, I resolved to keep my butt in my chair no matter how inspired I was to say something.
What happened then – because I *did* sit on my idea! – was being perhaps too eager to share it in my own small group. They really wanted to define DEAF-FRIENDLY, but I wanted to jump to envisioning implementation. The experience was frustrating, but I did feel as if I understood what was happening. We were given a list of questions to choose among and discuss, someone immediately asked about defining DEAF-FRIENDLY but I jumped in, asking, “Can I jump to another topic? I have an idea about setting up the next conference….” I shared it, they watched me (we were all signing), and when I finished another member in the group asked, “Why do you think it is that we always talk about students’ learning when the topic is about being DEAF-FRIENDLY?” At the time, I could perceive absolutely no relationship between what she said and what I had said. This did not seem to be a turn in a conversation, not listening, but waiting for the next gap in which to speak.
Hmmm. I observed how the rest of the discussion went in our small group. The next speaker went into a lengthy discussion of how “we always talk about using ASL, making it policy, over and over…” He admitted, being hearing, to having a natural tendency to follow verbal speech, and then shared a litany of personal experiences. I was reminded of a comment Betty Colonomos made at the beginning of the Business Meeting when we were discussing the Standing Rules: that people have no voice out there in the world, but we have one here and people need to use it. So everyone got their chance to speak but we did not actually converse. Why is that? I think (in this case) it had to do with time and timing. Because this event came at the end of the conference, people really needed to debrief. The immediate felt need was to process this experience in relation to the past. People with more practice reflecting on these kinds of dynamics were able to bring their awareness more into the present, but the move to imagining the future was premature. The ground was not prepared either prior to or during the conference, and we did not have enough time in this venue to wade through the individual processing until everyone was at a sufficiently-sated stage of self-disclosure and internal satisfaction to shift, collectively, to action planning.
In the end, I think what we generated as a group in this workshop was a venue for hearing interpreters to vent. One of the first Deaf speakers said, forthrightly, that she felt that most of us “cannot walk and sign at the same time.” Another Deaf person commented on the lack of tolerance most hearing people have (at least in this context) “for missing a little bit once in awhile.” That observation reminded me of my experience with other languages in Europe, which I described in a blogpost at the time as “cotton ’round the brain.” In a discussion following that blog entry, I tried to describe how awareness of perceptible stimuli simply shifts depending on the language one knows – or does not know. The main message I gleaned from the way the DEAF-FRIENDLY discussion unfolded in our small group is that it seems we assume being DEAF-FRIENDLY means being non-deaf/hearing unfriendly: as if the two are

a) extreme opposites and

b) in competition with each other.

I do not believe this needs to be the case.

Popularity: 10% [?]

“Where does he get this?” I heard another workshop participant exclaim after David N. Evans’ flash animation eye blink slide illustrating the natural coordination of the reading mind with the biological moistening mechanisms that lubricate the eyeball.

“Stern and Dunham (1990) … noted task demands affect when one blinks (referred to as blink location). For example, readers tend to place their blinks at ’semantically appropriate places in the text,’ such as the end of a sentence, paragraph, or page” (italics in original, bold added)

Coordination between when (timing) and where (location, the “places”) is the focal point of most of my research. The two examples of eye blinking during reading (English text) and as grammar and prosody during signed utterances (ASL specific) inspire a hypothesis about Mikhael Bakhtin’s original, conceptual use of the term “utterance” in his analyses of discourse in novels and the uptake of the term by researchers of spontaneous spoken language in real (nonfictional) face-to-face interaction. Could Bakhtin have, intuitively or subconsciously, noted a physiological coordination of eye blinks with the spoken production? Or felt his own blinking while he read?

David swears he did not color coordinate his wardrobe with the background, but he did follow Deaf norms and tell us (hundreds of participants) that someone had informed him of the match. That’s a concrete example of the kind of co-incidence of space (place/location) and time (during the moment of his presentation) that we all could learn to follow. (A Facebook group, perhaps, tracking David’s presentation wardrobe until the next RID conference in Atlanta, 2011?!) During and after his workshop, I have been remembering various sources of information about the eyes and vision. For instance, Eye Movement Desensitization and Response, which is a treatment for trauma.
The way I understand EMDR (simply) is, “Memories are linked in networks that contain related thoughts, images, emotions, and sensations.” If I recall the explanations of EMDR when it was first introduced to me, the network of memories can include particular (specific, repeated) eye movement, which can be deliberately altered through practice, disrupting parts of the linkage that re-create the emotions of the trauma. “Learning occurs when new associations are forged with material already stored in memory.” I also thought about a recent lesson from a yoga teacher, about using the opposite side eye ‘to lead’ when turning, because it provides the perceptual system with different input than leading with the same eye on the same side (i.e., when turning to the right, the right eye tends to go there first, leading the rest of the body into that future time and space). By disrupting the habitual routine, we train ourselves to be more open to the unexpected, instead of relying on typical expectations.
Also fresh in mind is my friend Anuj’s recent phd defense on the topic of Risk Perception and Awareness Training for young/new drivers, in which eye gaze is tracked and discussed with students, improving their awareness and thus reducing the risk of accidental death. I was struck by how unaware driver’s are of

1. the significance of looking,
2. of knowing where to look, and
3. being deliberate about what one is looking for.

I frequently witness a similar unconsciousness with hearing (non-deaf) people when they “see” a Deaf person (or an interpreter) signing but do not realize this is language! Most people know it is rude to interrupt another person while they are talking, but this very basic etiquette often vanishes when the mode of communication is visual instead of auditory. Part of the rudeness stems, I suspect, not just from different conceptions of time (the hurry-hurry of hearing life, the long-goodbyes of deaf life) but also from different perceptual experiences of time. You could say that an ASL brain is processing in one dimension, while a spoken English brain is processing in another dimension. When persons used to using only one of the two languages communicate with each other (with or without an interpreter), a phase accommodation must be made – by one or both. When an interpreter is involved, the process of dimensional juggling or phase shifting is made blatantly obvious. There are repeat patterns of the co-incidence of time/timing and space/place during interpretation that compose sites of cultural co-creation, as well as opportunities for repeating oppression, practicing empowerment, and experimenting with cooperation.
Notes:
* re: “Hymnal” for the conference handouts booklet: “I told the interpreters to use that word,” David explained in ASL. The interpreter voiced this into English, adding (deadpan), “it would not have been the word choice the interpreter would otherwise have used.”

Popularity: 5% [?]