125th Anniversary Scholarship for Black British Researchers - Black British Sign Language

Research has demonstrated that the African-American deaf community use an identifiable variety of American Sign Language (ASL) that is different from standard ASL (McCaskill et al., 2020). There has been no research thus far on documenting and describing British Sign Language (BSL) as used by Black British and Afro-Caribbean/African immigrant communities. Previous sociolinguistic research on BSL has, for example, focussed on factors such as region and age in the British deaf community, and demonstrated that BSL has both variation due to regional differences (with signs used in Birmingham, for example, different than those used in London, Glasgow, Cardiff, and Belfast) and age (with traditional signs used by older people being replaced by newer signs used by the younger generation) (Stamp et al., 2014). These studies have, however, failed to attract the participation of a representative number of deaf ethnic minorities, because the research has been led by deaf and hearing researchers from the White majority. In this project, we would like to address this shortcoming by working with a Black British researcher and with Black Deaf UK, the organisation that represents the Black deaf minority. We would consult with Black Deaf UK about the best approach, but would envisage filming sessions with at least 20-30 Black deaf people, documenting their lived experience as Black deaf people through interviews and conversations, and also discussing their use of BSL in order to identify how BSL is used to express specifically Black deaf identities. We possibly may have participants retell specific controlled narratives and also elicit specific lexical signs for comparison with non-Black BSL signers. This would be the first work to explicitly focus on documenting and describing Black deaf signers of British Sign Language, partly replicating work on Black ASL.

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Additional Funding Information

The University of Birmingham is proud to celebrate its remarkable 125-year journey and announce the launch of a groundbreaking scholarship initiative designed to empower and support Black British researchers in their pursuit of doctoral education.

These newly established 3.5-year scholarships aim to address underrepresentation and create opportunities for talented individuals from diverse backgrounds to excel in academia. You can find out more here: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/research/funding/black-british-researchers-scholarship

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