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Researching the Deaf Community: 1. Almanac

A collection of texts dedicated to the history and evolution of the d/Deaf community in Russia and the rest of the world

The Researching the Deaf Community: 1 almanac was published as part of GES-2 House of Culture’s interdisciplinary project of the same name, which aims at the development of a relatively new discipline in Russia—Deaf Studies, the study of d/Deaf communities and culture. An important step in this programme was the What does it mean to be d/Deaf? New challenges for the community conference, which was held at GES-2 in May 2023 in collaboration with the Higher School of Economics’s International Laboratory for Social Integration Research.

Photo: Gosha Bergal

Both the What does it mean to be d/Deaf? Conference and the striking statements that appear in this almanac provide a window onto an important and interesting theme. The framing of the question in the title of the conference points first of all to the richness of interpretations of the phenomenon: “what does it mean, ” second, to the existential urgency of lived experience, the brightness of the multimodal feeling of identity: “to be d/Deaf.” In fact, “to be d/Deaf” is not the same as “to be called d/Deaf” or as when somebody uses this quality as a metaphor. “To be” means to think, to feel, to experience, to remember, and to feel with the body.

—Elena Yarskaya-Smirnova, “Mutual understanding and collaboration: in place of a conclusion”

The almanac publishes the results of the Researching the Deaf Community (RDC) group’s work, conference materials prepared by representatives of the d/Deaf community, specialists, and students, and articles written especially for the publication. The collection is comprised of three thematic sections—”History, ” “Community, ” and “Language.” It seeks to contribute to the establishment of Deaf Studies as a research discipline, and explores the social and cultural aspects of the life of deaf people and of CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults) in Russia, as well as the linguistics of sign language and its use in online communication.

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