The course is in the most general terms a case study of deafness and Deaf culture, as well as a language course. Students learn Irish Sign Language in the first four weeks of the summer course, and subsequently put it to practice on a field trip to the Deaf community in Ireland in the fifth week.
The topic of Perspectives on deafness and Deaf culture will be approached from different academic perspectives including anthropology/sociology, history, biology, cognitive neuroscience, medicine, philosophy, and linguistics. There are four main themes: (1) history and politics of deafness, (2) the Deaf world and Deaf identity, (3) biology of deafness and perceptions of same, and (4) sign languages and sign linguistics.
Theme (1) includes such topics as history of deaf communities in Europe and around the world, the status of sign languages, deaf education, and oralism.
What is understood by Deaf culture, how Deaf people around the world live, and the difference between biological and cultural deafness are the main topics of theme (2).
Theme (3) considers the causes of deafness and treatments available, as well as the attitudes of deaf individuals towards the notion of treatment at all.
Finally, theme (4) takes a look at what it means for a language when its primary articulators are the hands, the face and the body. When does gesture grammaticalize? Where do modality differences play a role?
Format
1. Learning Irish Sign Language
- Group bonding activities in the first week, involving group tasks and games (silent lego, improv murder) carried out in silence, and daily tasks around the city carried out without speaking
- Active instruction and practice: 4 x 3 hours in the morning in week 1, 5x 3 hours in the morning weeks 2-4.
- Group activities for practice: minimally 1 hour each day
2. Perspectives on deafness and Deaf culture
- Afternoon class sessions with guest speakers
- Excursions to visit deaf communities, and to experience buildings which have been designed for visual language, in, for example, Ede, Groningen
- Visit to the Sign language café Utrecht. Takes place once a month on Thursday evenings, accompanied by Sign Language interpreters from the HU (to be confirmed)
- Field trip to deaf school, for example, the Guyot in Haren, and/or the retirement home in Ede (or other deaf institutions).
- Eetlokaal TL (http://www.eetlokaallt.nl/) in Amsterdam where there are deaf staff
3. Field Trip/Immersion Trip to Dublin
- Students stay for five days and four nights in units of 3 to 4 people at the Deaf Village in Cabra, Dublin
- Activities are organized together with people from the Dublin Deaf community, include trips to musea and art galleries; special events, to be determined when the city agenda is known, communal meals, and weather permitting, trips to the seaside and some hiking in the Dublin or Wicklow mountains.
Application
Application deadline is 20 November 2015.
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