There’s no distance in a DEAF virtual space

Yesterday, I was writing to a friend in the US who also presented at the AAG in Seattle, and who is doing research on virtual spaces in gaming… her comment, in response to my question about her interest in connecting those virtual spaces and the DEAF community, is that she knows of little work that has specifically looked at the use of virtual space to mobilise a DEAF community, or Deaf politics.

The Italian bill episode is a good example of this kind of mobilisation. The Deaf activist site, Grumpy Old Deafies, that has been dormant since the 20th July last year when it published the outcome of the 2010 ICED meeting in Vancouver, exploded into life on the 21st May with information in LIS and English. There then followed information, petitions, postings in ISL (Irish sign), BSL, more LIS, DGS (German sign), letters to the Italian Government from academics in the UK and Ireland, responses from Deaf organisations in the UK and overseas, and new links to ongoing protests in the US…

This kind of mobilisation has been seen in the hearing world, using the Internet… but would have been completely unheard of in the DEAF community until recently.

Harvey’s shrinking world anyone…