Abstract

This research seeks to trace how communicating feels, smells, tastes, sounds and looks in the spaces between deaf people and hearing people. By shifting the focus from “barriers” to spaces, from limitations to relationalities, and way from auralism and phonocentrism towards a polysensory understanding of communication, this thesis breaks with the conventional constructions of the hearing/not-hearing nexus, and opens up many new prospects for interpersonal and intersensory interaction between hearing people and deaf people. This creative and community-engaged ethnographic project was an inter-sensorial exploration that included eleven participants across four languages: English, French, American Sign Language (ASL), and Langue des signes québécoise (LSQ) as well as multiple language modalities, written, spoken, and signed. The first phase explored a social-institutional context and involved conducting two semi-structured interviews with two deaf university students who pursued human rights complaints against the same university after being denied access to sign language interpretation—even as their respective cases occurred twenty years apart. The second phase explored a social-creative context and involved conducting two focus groups, each participant exploring their own sense of communicating across deaf and hearing spaces. In each phase, participants described their narratives and experiences through visual, tactile, and auditory mediums, including narratives, maps, collages, video, sign language poetry, objects, and illustrations. Next, situational and relational mapping methods were employed to trace the experiences sensorily and multi-modally. Findings suggest that in contrast to popular transactional communication models, there are no barriers or gaps to communication; communicating is a persistent, inter-sensory experience that exists in the relationships between people and their environment, and occurs across time and space. In this light, new conversations are needed regarding our accountability to these relationships and how these inter-sensory spaces of communication impact our individual and collective well-being.