Deaf Caribbean Academic Network: Making language policy work for deaf communities in the Caribbean

The Caribbean region is home to many thousands of deaf people who communicate using a signed language, rather than a spoken one. Although people tend to assume that each country has its own sign language, the situation is actually much more compliacted - even one relatively small Caribbean island can have two or three sign languages.

We focus on two problems. The first is to do with the different kinds of sign language used in the Caribbean.

The Caribbean faces many natural disasters, such as hurricanes and volcanoes. Imagine that you are a deaf mother or father, looking after your family. There is an emergency, and everyone around you is making preparations, but you are still trying to find out what is happening. You turn the television on, but the small interpreter in the corner of the screen is signing a language that you do not understand.

Or imagine that you are a deaf child who signs at home - but when you go to school, the teacher does not sign the language that you know. The teacher might speak to you, so that you do not understand what they are saying. Or the teacher might use a different sign language that you also do not understand.

These are some of the serious barriers that deaf people face in the Caribbean. Yet these barriers can be removed if language policies are effective (for example, if the government makes sure that the right information is provided in the right language for each deaf person).

The second problem is that deaf people have struggled to access education, so they often do not have the qualifications that their hearing peers have. There are several deaf people in the Caribbean who are knowledgeable and who conduct research, but they are not able to get a foothold in the academic world.

Our project aims to solve both of these problems. First, we set up a Deaf Caribbean Academic Network (DeafCAN), with deaf people in Trinidad & Tobago, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. They share their knowledge and experiences with each other, and we put them in touch with experts from around the world who can help them to find ways to conduct research together.

Secondly, we collect the experiences of deaf people - for example when trying to access information in the right language - and use these to help the government make better language policy in future.

The work of our DeafCAN Network is expected to have a significant impact on the lives of marginalised deaf people by analysing their perspectives on sign language policy, and we find ways to keep the Network going beyond the life of this project.