Category Archives: profiles

profiles of D/deaf and hard of hearing academics

Profile: Dr. Maartje De Meulder

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A white woman with light brown short hair smiles with her hand on her hip. She is wearing a white t-shirt with an image of Frida Kahlo.
  • Current title: senior researcher/lecturer
  • Location: University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, the Netherlands
  • Field of expertise: Deaf Studies and applied language studies
  • Years of experience (since start of PhD): 8
  • Website: https://maartjedemeulder.be/
  • Twitter: @mdemeulder

Background?

I was born in Flanders, Belgium to hearing (non-signing) parents. I am the oldest of four. I grew up hard-of-hearing and became deaf in my teenage years. I went to a regular school where I used hearing aids and FM and relied on lipreading. I was raised and educated in Dutch, and learned to sign (Vlaamse Gebarentaal – Flemish Sign Language – VGT) when I was 16, through socializing in the Flemish deaf community. At home with my partner and two children I use VGT. In my personal and professional life, on any given day I use a mixture of languages: Nederlandse Gebarentaal (NGT) (Sign Language of the Netherlands), British Sign Language, International Sign, VGT, Dutch, and English. As a Belgian I can make do in French, and I can understand ASL (or some academic ASL at least).

How did you get to where you are?

After I obtained my first MA degree in Belgium (Disability Studies), I felt that something was missing. I applied (and got funding, quite importantly) to study for an MSc in Deaf Studies at the Centre for Deaf Studies (CDS) at the University of Bristol in 2005. It was one of the best decisions of my life. It felt like coming home, not only in terms of content of the study but also because there were other deaf students, the classes were mainly taught in British Sign Language, some of the professors and lecturers were deaf themselves, and the social life was also in sign. It was in Bristol that I realized I wanted to do more research in Deaf Studies. Bristol also gave me a brilliant network of friends and colleagues.

After I got my degree, I actually got the opportunity to do a PhD at the University of Bristol, but decided to defer the funding for one year because I felt I had done enough studying by then (6 years), and wanted something different that was more practice-oriented. The Flemish deaf association offered me a job in their advocacy team and I decided to take the offer. This was also one of the decisions that have deeply influenced my life and who I am as a researcher and a person. Eventually, one year became five years. Five years of advocacy work (linked to deaf education, access, sign language interpreting services, tv broadcasting, etc.), community work (organizing events, workshops, courses), learning to engage with a great number of different people from all walks of life. It was a great experience.

After five years, I felt it was time to get back to research again, but obviously by that time my funding in Bristol was no longer available. I started to look for PhD funding and in the end got a PhD position at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. My PhD was about the legal recognition of sign languages — more specifically in Finland and Scotland, where I followed the process from initial campaign to final adopted law. After my PhD I started a post-doc position at the University of Namur in Belgium funded by the Marie Curie Actions, for which I did a study on sign language vitality in Flanders. When that funding ran out, I applied for a few academic jobs and got a position at the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht (HU) in the Netherlands, which is currently my institution. HU is the only university in the Netherlands that trains sign language interpreters (at BA-level) and they also offer a Master in Deaf Studies. I teach both BA and MA students, and am also a senior researcher at the research group ‘Participation through Communication’, where I am responsible for carrying out Deaf Studies and sign language research.

What is the biggest professional challenge you face (as educator or researcher)? How do you mitigate this challenge?

Working with sign language interpreters is definitely one of the biggest challenges, so much so that I decided to make it a professional and research interest of mine 🙂

Being an academic who is deaf (and a woman) is another challenge: when you have critical opinions and are used to voicing these, you are quickly seen as ‘angry’, ‘emotional’, or ‘irritated’.

Not linked to being a deaf academic, but as a researcher in general:

  • At this stage in my career, I find a real challenge is having to adapt research agendas based on your institution/employer/funding, which means I feel I can never really finish projects. People are asking me for publications, presentations, etc., based on my PhD or postdoc research (I haven’t even yet analysed all the data I collected during my postdoc!). I am now based at an applied university, which means I need to do practice-based research. This is really interesting and fun to do, but also means it’s not always so easy to connect this with the other stuff I was working on before.
  • Linked to the previous point: academia can be overwhelming. The work is never finished, there is always that one paper to finish, that one grant to follow up on, that one article that is still on your to-read list. There is competition, you need to publish, teach, and do admin. As deaf academics, we do all the extra emotional labor too, that is often invisible: working with sign language interpreters (it’s not just working with them!; it’s looking for the right ones, preparing them, debriefing them, etc.), educating colleagues about accessibility issues, coping with hearing fragility. Me and many of my deaf colleagues also do a lot of volunteer work to support other deaf academics and Deaf Studies & sign language researchers (for example our work for Acadeafic and Dr Deaf, …). I had a burn-out last year and I don’t want to go through that again. So I firmly set boundaries, I let people know those boundaries, I don’t feel guilty for not working overtime, I unplug now and then.

What is an example of accommodation that you either use or would like to use in your current job?

Sign language interpreters are necessary to do my job, but since I’ve only been at my institution in the Netherlands for just over a year and have to work in NGT increasingly in professional/academic contexts, I’m still finding out which NGT interpreters ‘match’ with me for which professional contexts. I’d like to work with a few designated ones but am currently in the ‘trial and error’ phase still, which is frustrating often.

I’d like to use caption services more. As deaf academics (in Europe) sign language interpreters are often the accommodation we request or are given, but watching an academic presentation in English with for example a BSL interpreter (even a very good one), is still a challenge. People tend to think that with interpreters we have ‘access’ and that’s all there is to it. But that’s actually not true. Interpreters are an accommodation we have to work with to make it work, so to say. The source is in one language, while the output is in another. You don’t have to be a language researcher to know how much can get lost in translation. When we see interpreters’ signed utterances we need to do the mental work of understanding the meaning and how it relates to the source language and the concepts the speaker is using for example. Sometimes it is just easier, and requires much less mental load, to follow the presentation in the same language and modality. And for Q&A and networking, use interpreters.

Tell us about your website, Acadeafic.

I started Acadeafic with friends/colleagues Annelies Kusters, Joseph Murray and Erin Moriarty (also deaf academics) in May 2019. Acadeafic is a deaf-curated, multi-author platform that allows Deaf Studies and sign language researchers to share their work in a bite-sized format. There is an amazing output of research on Deaf Studies and sign languages, but as a research community we want to do more to share our work with audiences within and beyond academia, on an open-access basis, and in formats that are easier do digest than full-length academic prose. All our posts are bilingual, with a vlog in any sign language the author prefers and a blog in English. Most of our posts are based on recently published articles or chapters. We also host series of posts based on special issues or edited volumes. We are keen to support junior researchers in promoting their work. We also offer a space for editorials or opinion pieces related to (doing) Deaf Studies and sign language research, for example working with sign language interpreters, navigating academia as a deaf scholar, research methodology and ethics, and access to academic discourse. All our submissions go through peer review conducted by Acadeafic and/or external reviewers, also all deaf. So if you are a Deaf Studies and/or sign language researcher and want to promote your work, get in touch!

What advice would you give your former self?

You’re not here to please everyone. 

Any funny stories you want to share?

A few years ago I was at an academic conference dinner. We were at a mixed deaf/hearing table, and there was one sign language interpreter with us. I was talking with one hearing academic and when we had a brief pause, the interpreter left a bit to take a break. I left my phone in my room and I didn’t have anything else to write with to continue the conversation with him, so I gestured ‘phone’ to him in the hopes that he would take out his phone and type. Instead he took out a bit of paper and handed me his phone number. I was like ‘oh’ and he quickly realized that this wasn’t what I was asking him. It was embarrassing, but funny, and the ice was broken for the rest of the evening. 

Profile: Dr. Khadijat Rashid

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  • Current title: Interim Dean of the Faculty
  • Location: Gallaudet University, Washington DC
  • Field of expertise: International Development, International Economic Policy
  • Years of experience (since start of PhD): 25
  • Website: https://my.gallaudet.edu/khadijat-rashid

.

Background?

I’m deaf, as in profoundly, deeply deaf. I can’t even use hearing aids because they are worthless for me, though I do have an implant that I occasionally use to hear environmental sounds. I went to all kinds of schools: hearing schools for my early elementary education, an all deaf residential school for K-8, a deaf program within a hearing high school (not really mainstreaming since all the deaf students were together with teachers who signed). The journey continued in college, where I was initially the only deaf student at college, then I left in my sophomore year for Gallaudet University where I was finally in an all-deaf environment.  Graduate school was again “mainstreamed” as I was the only deaf student in my MBA program at the University of Maryland, and then the only deaf student in my PhD cohort at American University. So it’s been quite a journey! I studied International Relations for my PhD because I was not going to be limited by my deafness and I was determined to study in a field that had nothing to do with Deaf people or deaf culture, and so of course, I ended up as a faculty member and administrator at Gallaudet!

I am an American immigrant. I was born in Nigeria, West Africa, and emigrated to the USA as a teenager, so most of my life has been in the USA. I speak Yoruba (a Nigerian language), and can “pass” in Nigerian Sign Language, pidgin (a creole hybrid of Nigerian languages and English), and of course, English.

How did you get to where you are?

As mentioned earlier, I wanted to study in a field that wasn’t defined by my being deaf, and I was always fascinated with economics, politics, and different cultures. And I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I grew up, so I decided I would study in as many different fields as possible. So, my undergraduate degrees (accounting, general business and computer information systems) were in the business field, and I worked for a while in a large corporation. Then I went for my MBA in International Business and Marketing. But I got disillusioned with the materialism I saw everywhere in Business and decided to go back to study these areas I had always been fascinated by, international politics and political economy. I wanted to understand what differentiated us as human beings, and how our economic interactions worked. I loved my PhD studies at American University (AU), which were a blend of anthropology, critical theory, international relations, politics, and economics —just what the doctor ordered for my eclectic interests! I took the long and meandering route to that PhD, since I started it in 1995 and took several detours, including several moves and the birth of two kids, along the way to completion in 2004. I even got expelled from the program because I was taking so long to complete the degree, but managed to talk my way back in 2003, promising that if they only gave me a chance, I would complete my PhD in a year. They took a risk and let me back in, and once that fire was lit under me, even though I had two kids under 5 by then, I did finish on time.

When I started out, there were still relatively few deaf women with PhD’s, and none in my field that I was aware of. Moreover, I was a young, Black, Deaf immigrant juggling a full-time job (I was already teaching at Gallaudet by this point), kids, and full-time graduate studies, so it was not a piece of cake. It definitely wasn’t easy. Sometimes I was so tired, it felt impossible to go on. But somehow I found that impetus from within me, and at some point the goal felt attainable, especially as I’d already sunk so much into the PhD by then. I also had my job as a faculty member to consider – I had to have that PhD if I wanted to advance, and I felt I couldn’t let down all the people who had invested in me and who were counting on me to make it. My advisor and the program faculty at AU were all terrific people, and their faith in me when I didn’t have faith in myself spurred me on.

What is the biggest professional challenge you face (as educator or researcher)? How do you mitigate this challenge?

As an administrator now, I really don’t have as much time anymore for the fun aspects of the job, which include teaching and research. Instead, I spend more time in meetings and solving issues for our faculty and staff, so that they can then go on to serve our students. I loathe that I don’t see that many students anymore since my schedule is not consistent enough for me to teach regularly, so I get my “fix” by mentoring students, attending events, and having open office hours where they can come and talk with me.

This year, a huge challenge has been COVID and the pivot to remote learning. If anyone had told me in January 2020 that we would move an entire university from face to face teaching to remote in less than a month, I’d have asked them what they were smoking. But we did it and we continue to do it now. Keeping students and faculty engaged while we are all apart and isolated has been tough, but I’m proud to say that our community is resilient and we are making it work. We do so by having regular information sessions, hosting webinars, and sending out information blasts frequently. I’ve found that the greatest anxiety is in not knowing; sharing information, even the bad stuff, helps people understand what is happening, and many are relieved and appreciative to know what is going on.

What is an example of accommodation that you either use or would like to use in your current job?

Can’t think of any. Gallaudet is fully accessible to me as a Deaf woman.  

What advice would you give your former self?

Be braver and trust yourself! So often I didn’t speak up during my assistant professor days because I didn’t want to be that “angry Black woman,” or make people uncomfortable, or rock the boat. But sometimes that boat deserves to be rocked. I look back at all the grunt work I had to do, the committee assignments no one else wanted, the classes I had to teach even when I had a sick baby at home with no time off, the department meetings at odd hours that meant I wouldn’t see my kids awake at all that week… all the stuff that faculty today would and should protest. 

Now I make it a point to try and recognize when things like that are happening, and I’m actually in a position now to prevent them most of the time. And every time I have spoken up against an unfair situation, I have found that others often felt the same way, but perhaps were afraid or insecure or too junior, and were just waiting for someone to take the lead to change things. So now I try to be that person. I’m far enough along in my career that speaking out no longer carries the risk it did in my earlier days, and I use that superpower to hopefully smoothen the path for others coming after me.

Any funny stories you want to share?

Hmm… thinking… my kids are now 18 and 21 and they ask me all the time if I actually have a real job, because all they see is me at my computer typing away or signing during a meeting. They can’t believe I get paid to do that!

What is your typical day like?

Start at 8.30 am with a meeting over zoom. I’m quite the zoom expert now! More meetings until noon, get some work done, paperwork signed, attend a strategy session, feel hungry and wonder why, then realize it’s past 2pm and eat lunch at my desk while responding to emails. More meetings, and then finally call it a day around 8pm. Boring! But that’s a COVID day for you.

Profile: Dr. Jaipreet Virdi

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Young woman with brown skin and long black hair smiles. She has dark brown eyes and wears a black shirt and jacket. The background is blurred.

Check out Dr. Virdi’s debut book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (link here)


Current Title: Assistant Professor
Location: University of Delaware (Newark, DE)
Field of expertise: History of medicine, technology, disability
Years of experience (since start of PhD): 12
 Website: http://www.jaivirdi.com
Twitter: @jaivirdi 

Background?
I was born in Kuwait to Sikh parents. At age four, I became ill with meningitis and was hospitalized for nearly six months. During the course of my recovery, we learned that I had lost my hearing and mobility and that my eyesight was severely weakened. Rehabilitation taught me how to walk again. Later, I got glasses and was fitted for hearing aids. In 1989, the year before the first Gulf War, my family went to Toronto for vacation and to learn about schooling for me. We ended up deciding to stay, which in hindsight was lucky, as the war destroyed our neighborhood back home. I ended up being sent to a school with a class for deaf and hard-of-hearing children and was educated in oralism and received speech therapy; when I was 13, in grade 7, I was mainstreamed into the school’s gifted program and later mainstreamed into high school classes. 

How did you get to there you are?
I consider myself to be blessed to have teachers who encouraged my inquisitive nature and taught me how to work independently. One year in my HOH class, for instance, I was the youngest student; my teacher crafted a special curriculum for me that required me to conduct a lot of independent research on varied topics, including Greek mythology, medieval astronomy, and even 1950s pop culture. After receiving my BA in philosophy of science, I was lost on what to do with my life. I had been working in fashion merchandising and marketing for several years and it seemed natural to turn it to an established career. I randomly decided one evening to investigate a PhD program at the University of Toronto and set up a meeting with the Graduate Chair. Honestly, I didn’t think I would get in or that graduate studies would be a good fit for me, but I applied because I wanted to see if I could. No one else in my family has a PhD and I had no guidance about navigating academia. Everything was a challenging learning experience. 

What is the biggest professional challenge (as educator or researcher)? How do you mitigate this challenge?
Right now, it is finding a work-life balance, especially because both work and life are occurring at home!

What is an example of accommodation that you either use or would like to use in your current job?
I’m a staunch advocate for captioning for all professional and educational meetings. In the pre-COVID-19 world, whenever I gave public talks, I ensured they were accessible in different ways—having closed-captioning/CART services or providing a printout of my talk for the audience. Now, I caption my recorded videos and insist on captioning whenever I do public events. This insistence isn’t just for me—the way I see it, if this access improves my ability to participate and communicate, then it must improve others’ experiences too. So I try to hold my own work at the accessibility standards I want to see for everyone. . 

What advice would you give your former self?
That intuitive gut feeling? Don’t doubt it. 

Any funny stories you want to share?
Once I was taking a flight and revealed to the airline that I was deaf, so I could receive support services if necessary. When I got to the gate, I identified myself and the attendants instructed me to take a seat where they could see me, so that they could get my attention when it was time to board. While waiting, I felt a tap on my shoulder. One of the attendants wanted to tell me that boarding would begin in five minutes and instead of saying so, he did this series of motions to communicate:

<points finger at me> 
<points to gate>
<makes exaggerated flying movement with his arms>
<shows his hand to indicate 5 minutes>
<gives me a thumbs up>

What is your typical day like? 
On a good day?
Up at 7am, walk the dogs and feed them, have coffee and read a manuscript or article. By 9am, work on my own writing. Emails and lunch. More writing or editing in the afternoon. A hike in early evening with the dogs and my partner, followed by dinner at home and a movie or novel before bed. 

On a bad day?
Who knows, time has no meaning. Neither does sleep!

Profile: Dr. Paige Glotzer

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  • Current title: Assistant Professor and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Location: Madison, Wisconsin
  • Field of expertise: U.S. history
  • Years since PhD: 4
  • Twitter: @apaigeoutofhist; link to website 

Background

I was an only child in Brooklyn, NY, raised by supporting and loving parents. Neither is hard of hearing. Growing up, I never met other HoH/Deaf kids or got accommodations in school. We never watched things with captions or did anything that would help me gain the vocabulary to articulate my experiences. I was likely born HoH, but I finally got diagnosed at age seven and I didn’t get hearing aids until age 16. I got them when a noisy air conditioner in a classroom finally made it impossible for me to compensate with lip reading and context clues. I remember crying because at the time I thought getting hearing aids meant I had a deficit that I couldn’t overcome with effort. (To this day I sometimes don’t appreciate the extent to which I constantly work hard to hear, but I definitely don’t consider myself as having a loss or deficit). I somehow muddled through college with good grades, still unable and unwilling to communicate my needs. It really took graduate school for me to become empowered and proud of who I am. It’s there that I found allies and actually met other HoH and Deaf people. It was there that I first learned terms like “ableism.” I sometimes get frustrated thinking back on all the things that could have been. What if I had learned ASL when I was little? What if I had been exposed to Deaf culture growing up? I try to channel those feelings in productive ways. For example, over the last couple of years I have made a lot of progress with my parents on explaining to them why I need to see their lips when they talk. We already had a great relationship but it’s getting even better now.

How did you get to where you are?

Becoming a historian was a no-brainer for me. I’ve always been interested in history and I’ve always been interested in cities. Long before I formally pursued this career path, my favorite activity was walking through cities and wondering why they looked or functioned in certain ways. I have sharpened those questions over time to focus on the business of housing segregation. 

I have been reflecting on the past lately because my first book, How the Suburbs Were Segregated, was just published in April. It began as a paper I wrote my first year of graduate school in 2010. Graduate school got off to a rough start. It was the first day and I was excited to begin my path toward my dream job of historian. I walked into my first seminar, sat down, and realized with dawning horror that I couldn’t hear a single thing. The professor mumbled. The room echoed. We were seated in a formation where no one directly faced each other. I spent two silent hours trying to hold back tears. Later that day I finally realized: if I wanted to be a historian, I was going to have to do not just the work my peers did but also all the extra work of creating conditions where I could hear. I did that work, I am doing it now as a professor, and know I’ll always have to.

What is the biggest professional challenge (as educator or researcher)? How do you mitigate this challenge?

I face the challenge of teaching classes where some students have taken college-level U.S. history sitting next to others who have never had American history in their entire lives. Being a disabled educator has inspired me to meet this challenge by applying the principles of universal design to my teaching. I ask myself what decisions about pedagogy, content, and course design will create scaffolding and flexibility for everyone. Universal design has also allowed me to consider the intersections of disability with different experiences students face. For example, I make all my readings available digitally and for free. This makes the readings more accessible for students, but it also helps students who might not be able to afford to purchase books. I do not put the burden on the student to request an exception to some sort of “normal;” I teach for everyone.

What is an example of accommodation that you either use or would like to use in your current job?

Volume Amplification helps me do my job better. I have worked with my department to ensure that microphones will be used at all meetings and events with over ten people. For teaching, I use something called Catch Boxes, squishy cubes with microphones inside. My students can toss the Catch Boxes to each other and speak into them. It’s a form of amplification that’s scalable from my small classes, where I use one Catch Box, up through large lectures where I use two or more. The great thing about the Catch Boxes is that they open up new pedagogic possibilities—I can have free-flowing discussions even in a large lecture. My colleagues who are not hard of hearing generally write that off as impossible.

Any funny stories you want to share?

It’s difficult to think of a single story because sometimes my life feels like one long blooper reel. The way that I hear makes distinguishing certain sounds from one another very difficult. Unfortunately, that means I have a very hard time knowing whether someone has said ‘Paige’ or ‘Kate.’ This is a problem whenever I’m in the room with a Kate, which is weirdly often! I happened to sit behind a Kate for most of my senior year of high school. Those were fun times. 

Pale skinned woman with short wavy brown hair and plaid shirt laughs while looking downward

Advice to younger self

“You internalized a lot of shame and anxiety about your hearing because you thought your hearing was an inconvenience to others rather than an important part of who you are. It is okay to ask to turn on captions. It is okay to demand accommodations. And you are justified in feeling frustration or anger when people make ableist assumptions. You’ll learn to become a better advocate for yourself over time.”

Profile: Alex Lu

grad school, networking, profiles,

PhD Student, University of Toronto, Canada

Field of expertise: Computational Biology

Years of experience (since start of PhD): 5 years 

Describe your hearing: Profoundly deaf; I’m oral and voice for myself, but I use ASL interpreters for professional interactions

Background

I grew up mainstreamed in Vancouver. For most of grade school, I used hearing aids —back when I was in elementary school, we still had those clunky FM systems that attached to your hearing aids through wires and boots. I was lucky to have a hearing resource teacher who recognized the importance of sign language, and she brought in a Deaf teacher to teach me and a few other Deaf/hard-of-hearing students the basics in grade 9. In grade 11, I decided to stop using my hearing aids entirely. Part of my decision was practical—I had a progressive hearing loss, and it was getting to the point where I felt like my hearing aids weren’t helping enough to be worth the headache they gave me from amplifying everything. But the other reason was because I had grown to resent what they represented: how hearing people always expected me to “fix” myself to be acceptable to them. My parents and teachers were furious—I was in the middle of a highly intensive International Baccalaureate program and they didn’t know how I would get through it. But I managed to cobble together strategies, including basic ASL and borrowing notes from classmates. I’ve used ASL interpretation for my academic needs ever since. 

I’m also queer, and outside of academia, I do a lot of activism in bridging Deaf and queer communities. For a while before my PhD (and even well into it), I was active in many non-profits. Some of my fondest memories include negotiating accessibility in Pride boardrooms, emceeing Deaf poets for spoken word festival events, and moderating all-Deaf panels about prison justice. 

How did you get to where you are?

Many people in academia will talk about how they’ve always known what they’ve wanted to study since they were very small. I am definitely not one of those people. Rather, I got to my current interests by taking opportunities as they arose, and by being receptive to advice. I began studying computational biology as an undergraduate because a family friend mentioned it might appeal to me. I had many interests and didn’t know whether I wanted to major in English or history or a science; I figured that their advice was as good as any. As I worked through my degree, I met a graduate student who asked me to volunteer for a lab that wanted someone with computational skills, and I specifically got involved in image analysis because that was the data the lab worked with. That experience opened the door to my PhD; I applied to just two graduate schools upon finishing my undergraduate, and I figured that if I didn’t get into either, I would just start my career. But one graduate school liked my background enough that they accepted me, and I’ve been working in image analysis and computer vision ever since. 

That isn’t to say that I am not passionate about what I do; I love working on challenges in big biological image datasets, and it really challenges my creative problem solving skills. But I am fundamentally a very flexible person, and I can easily see alternative histories where I stumbled into something radically different—comparative literature, maybe, or psychology—and would have been equally as happy and passionate about that. In retrospect, taking opportunities as they arose was a very good strategy for me as a marginalized disabled person—it meant that I was always surrounded by people who were eager to invite me into their space, so I attribute a lot of my success to being easy-going enough that I could let these people guide my journey. 

What is the biggest professional challenge? How do you mitigate this challenge?

Anything that involves travel. I never know whether I will be able to find qualified accessibility services when I travel for conferences or other academic commitments. For conferences, my school has been terrific about having my regular academic ASL interpreters fly out with me: we have flown to New York, Los Angeles, and Vancouver together, and that guarantees that I can be fully involved in the important networking connections that are being made there. However, this is not a problem I have fully solved. I’m due to spend three months in Switzerland for a research exchange soon, and since they use a different sign language than mine, I wasn’t able to find local services. I’ve had to come up with more creative solutions; my current plan is to have my interpreters in Toronto Skype with me remotely for regular meetings, and I will have to see how this works out. But in general, I think about academic mobility a lot for disabled people. While a lot of my able-bodied peers are able to take jobs and opportunities anywhere in the world, I feel like there are more hurdles for me, and I’m trying to find ways to not let this limit the steps I can take in my career. 

What is an example of accommodation that you either use or would like to use in your current job?

I have an awesome accessibility plan with my school, which gives me “block times.” Three or four afternoons a week, I have an ASL interpreter present for any needs that might pop up: a collaborator or student showing up for a meeting, impromptu chats with my supervisor or colleagues, seminars that I learn about last-minute but seem interesting. The interpreter is booked regardless of there’s something happening or not, and if it turns out to be a quiet afternoon, she spends her time on prep or coordination. 

This accommodation has really made a massive impact on my success in my program and career. For example, it makes collaborations a lot easier: while I could book interpretation for each specific meeting happening, having to set a date three weeks ahead to confirm interpretation is a lot less convenient than a collaborator just dropping in with short notice to discuss how a project is proceeding. Similarly, I don’t have to devote a lot of energy into keeping abreast of departmental and campus events to be able to request interpretation ahead of time—I can spontaneously go to seminars as other graduate students mention them to me. It’s really leveled the playing field a lot in terms of how much time and energy I have to devote to being engaged and available as a scientist, compared to hearing people. 

What advice would you give your former self?

You work way better 9 to 5! I can’t believe how much more productive I became after I started sleeping 8 hours a night and giving myself more downtime—sometimes fewer working hours is more! 

Any funny stories you want to share?

I once helped host an ASL-interpreted theatre production. I taught the director how to say “thank you” in ASL, so she could wave goodbye to the community members I had invited as they were leaving the show. Unfortunately, between the start and end of the play, she forgot that the sign starts from the mouth, not the chin, and ended up signing “fuck you” all night… (People had a good sense of humor about it).

Profile: Dr. Stephanie Kerschbaum

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Associate Professor of English, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

Field of expertise: Writing Studies

  • Website
  • Twitter: @slkersch (although I rarely use it)

Describe your hearing: I wear two behind-the-ear hearing aids and speechread well in one-on-one and small-group settings. Due to years of childhood speech therapy, I use my voice to communicate for myself when conversing with hearing people and sign when around other signing deaf people.

Here’s me—in this professional head shot my short brown hair, red rectangular glasses, white skin, and many-toothed smile are readily visible, but my two behind-the-ear hearing aids are not. I have been deaf since birth. When I was about one, my parents learned I was deaf and my mom immediately enrolled us in parent-child sign language classes. I learned to sign before I could talk, but once I began talking, my mother reports that I largely stopped signing. 

I never completely let go of that early language learning, however—while I do not have deaf family members (other than those who have late-in-life hearing loss), I did attend a school with a significant population of deaf students from 5th through 8th grade, and began using sign language interpreters and CART when I went to college at The Ohio State University. I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to start graduate school in literary studies, but after taking an “Intro to Comp Studies” course as an MA student, ended up getting my PhD in Rhetoric and Composition.

I’m currently an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware, where I think a lot about different forms of writing and composing with and around disability as well as the ways that disability matters to all kinds of everyday experiences. I didn’t start focusing on disability studies until I was well into my first tenure-track job, though—it took me a long time to make explicit connections between my lived experiences of negotiating communication, interactional access, and building an academic career with the kind of theorizing I was doing around how people name and articulate differences—of all kinds—during everyday interactions. 

One of the biggest challenges that I face—and that is common to many disabled faculty members—involves building inclusive environments in which I can authentically and fully participate. By this, I mean situations where I can contribute in a timely fashion to an ongoing conversation or meeting in a way that enables others to attend to what I am sharing and incorporate it into the discussion. Too often, disabled faculty members experience environments where their participation is marginalized or mediated through interfaces, material arrangements, and patterns of behavior that frustrate rather than enable inclusion. 

In a room of 10 people I’m not likely to be able to completely follow a back and forth conversation without an interpreter. And even when an interpreter is in the room, I almost always still need to ask for some shifts in the interaction. Right now almost all of the responsibility for making those changes falls on me. So the hardest part is getting others in the room to participate in the work that is involved in making the kinds of changes needed.

An accommodation I’d love to have is actually an improvement on one that I already have and enjoy using. I love working with sign language interpreters. But there’s so much that goes on around making that work proceed well that I’d really like to have automatically be part of the experience: getting access copies of scripted remarks without having to go through complicated negotiations each time; well-structured processes for securing interpreting in which highly qualified interpreters well-trained in academic transliteration are readily available; having presenters, meeting organizers, and committee chairs consider interpreters’ needs when setting up rooms, sending out meeting materials, and more.

white young man with helmet on Stromboli volcano with gas steam in background and rocky landscape

Profile: Dr. Oliver Lamb

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NRC Research Associate, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Field of expertise: Geophysical monitoring of natural phenomena, with a particular interest in volcanoes.

Years of experience (since start of PhD): Nearly 6.

Describe your hearing: Moderately hard of hearing in both ears, since birth. I have worn hearing aids since the age of 4.

Education/BackgroundI grew up in a small village in Wales about 10 mins drive out of the university town of Aberystwyth. My first school was completely in welsh. This might sound daunting for a young HoH kid from an English speaking family, but looking back I don’t think I was really fazed by this. I think it was helped by having supportive and understanding teachers and a teacher’s assistant, always happy to repeat things for me (thank you Mrs. Fuller!). My lucky streak with helpful teachers continued into my English secondary school (ages 11-18), where I never really had any major issues with my hearing. Obviously, there were plenty of noisy classes, but a vast majority of teachers were able to keep them relatively quiet when necessary.

I cannot remember meeting any other deaf or HoH kid my age, but I also don’t remember ever feeling like I was the ‘weird kid’. I guess growing up with a father and grandfather who also wore hearing aids probably made me feel somewhat ‘normal’.

white man in bright sunshine (hat and sunglasses) on a rocky volcano barren of vegetation

How did you get to where you are?

I’ve always had an interest (some might call a passion) in volcanoes. I was lucky to visit Mt. St. Helens when my family visited the US when I was aged 8. I think it wasn’t until I spoke to a careers advisor a few years later that I realized that I could work on volcanoes as a career. From then on, I always had a determination to study geology. After school, I went to the University of Oxford where I got a Masters in Earth Sciences (equivalent of a bachelor plus master degrees). From there I was fortunate to land in the University of Liverpool to pursue a PhD. There, I worked on a project looking at seismic and infrasonic data from various lava dome eruptions around the world, and also carried out a little experimental work with acoustic emissions in the lab. After graduating in 2017, I was eager to take up whatever postdoctoral job offer might come way, and that is how I ended up in North Carolina, USA, in early 2018.

 What is your typical day like?

It’s really hard to say I have a typical day really. Each day brings a new task or challenge, whether it is coding a new way to analyze or plot my data, or preparing equipment for fieldwork, or writing and editing an article or grant application. Most of my days are spent writing either code or scientific articles. The coding can be tedious and frustrating, but it is such a nice feeling when it works and you get a great result and plot at the end. The article writing has also been very difficult (I always struggle with the discussion section), but I think I’m slowly getting the hang of it. When I am not writing, I am probably grappling with some equipment or instrument, or attending various seminars, or preparing for an upcoming conference.

The days spent on fieldwork are probably the most special though. I have been fortunate enough to travel around the world to places such as Mexico, Guatemala, Italy, and Chile. The preparation for fieldwork can be very intense, because lots of different arrangements have to be made in a short amount of time and in the right order. When I’m in the field, I am typically running around digging holes to put seismometers into the ground and/or leaving infrasound microphones to listen to very low frequency noises around the volcano. It can be exhausting, back-breaking work (each station might include 30-40 kilos of equipment and batteries), but it is well worth it when you get a chance to work in some truly spectacular landscapes. Also, it is a huge privilege for me to meet the many wonderful and generous people around the world, most of whom who share a passion for what I do.

 What is the biggest professional challenge (as educator or researcher)? How do you mitigate this challenge?

Managing the workload and the high level of anxiety that comes with it. I do my best to keep on top of projects, but I often find myself neglecting tasks that I told myself that I would do weeks or months before. It was, and still is, a huge learning curve for me when I started my postdoctoral career because of the greater responsibilities I suddenly faced. This includes managing projects, producing articles, writing grant proposals, rewriting grant proposals, managing equipment for fieldwork, preparing for fieldwork, checking there’s enough money in the budget for fieldwork, managing administrative bureaucracy, rewriting grant proposals again, and data management, all with one eye on the somewhat unclear future because I have no clear idea of where or when the next postdoctoral or lecturing position might come available. The anxiety has been very difficult to manage at times, but I am grateful that I have had and still have a network of colleagues, friends and family that I can talk to.

What is an example of accommodation that you either use or would like to use in your current job?

This is not really a specific accommodation, but one of my biggest and most frequent frustrations is having to deal with terrible acoustics during talks, whether they are department seminars or during conferences. More speakers need to learn how to project their voice to the whole room, with or without a microphone. I should not have to sit in the first few rows to hear you. Similarly, it’s an instant turn off for me whenever a speaker at a conference declines to use the provided microphone just so they can move around the room or stage. There’s no point in trying to seem like a dynamic TED speaker when I (and I suspect a lot of other people in the same room) can’t even hear what you’re saying.

Having said that, it would be great to have personal microphone/transmitter kit that I can bring to talks that will help me hear the speaker. Something that doesn’t disturb the speaker and/or other talk attendees and transmits the speakers voice directly to my ears via Bluetooth or telecoil. I have seen a few systems like this out there but none of them seemed to have quite the right specifications for me to consider using them. I’m all ears to anyone who might have suggestions for something like this.

 What advice would you give your former self?

Be more confident in our own abilities, but don’t be afraid to ask for help on even the most menial things.

 Any funny stories you want to share?

This might not be a funny story for some people, but what ho. I am a pretty heavy sleeper, and have slept through lots of noisy situations. However, when I camped next to active volcanoes I have been woken up by large noisy rockfalls (in Mexico) or a particularly large explosion (in Guatemala). It’s good to know my ears are at least tuned to noises that I definitely need to pay attention to!

The sound we can see: working with hearing loss in the field

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When I was 19 I went for a checkup with an audiologist and found out that I was hearing only 90% of what I should be. The doctor said that for my age, this was a high level of hearing loss, and attributed it possibly to the intense course of antibiotics I took for kidney failure when I was one year old. He suggested that I come back yearly to repeat the hearing exam, to verify if my ability further decreased below my current hearing levels. Of course I ignored this advice and never went back. When I started my graduate studies six years later, I decided it was finally time to visit the audiologist again, because I discovered that I could not hear the species of frog I had decided to base my research on. This was a very scary moment for me. How did I find myself in this situation?

In the last year of my undergraduate studies I took an ecology course and fell in love with the topic. I knew I wanted to earn a master’s degree in ecology, ideally working with animal populations. In Brazil, one has to take a standardized exam to enter a graduate program. I traveled 440 km to take the test and passed; I began my studies in the Federal University of Paraná located in Curitiba, in the south of Brazil. Among all the available mentors, there was one who carried out research on ecological dynamics of insects and anuran amphibians. I chose his lab and wrote a project proposal examining the population dynamics of an endemic species of stream frog (Hylodes heyeri) in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, specifically Pico do Marumbi State Park, Piraquara, in the state of Paraná. Much of what I was to be doing was completely new to me: I had never worked with frogs and I also had never practiced the mark-and-recapture method. I thus faced a steep learning curve and had to learn a LOT about lab and fieldwork from my team and my mentor. In my first field outing, during which I was to learn how to identify and capture the species I would study, I discovered that I could not hear the frog. A labmate who accompanied me to the field said, “Are you listening? The frog is so close to us.” He thought I was not hearing the frog due to lack of experience, or because of the background noise of the stream. I worried that something else was amiss, and this finally prompted me to go back to my audiologist. There, I discovered that I had lost 2% more of my hearing, and this loss compromised treble sounds, those in the range of high to very high frequencies, precisely overlapping my frog’s vocalizations.

Now, I’m a PhD student and I use hearing aids programmed specifically for my hearing loss, which primarily encompasses frequencies above 4000 Hz. I was initially ashamed to wear hearing aids because people mocked them. But I didn’t consider changing projects, because I knew I could get help localizing the frog. I also knew there would be ways for me to analyze the sound without necessarily hearing it. Even with hearing aids, however, I can only hear the call of my frog when I am no more than 4 meters away. Other members of my lab can detect the sound of the frog from much farther away, even when they are 20 meters or more from the stream. This means that for every survey I carry out in the field, I need a person to accompany me to guide me to the frog, using their sense of hearing to identify the sound. But the assistance I receive in the field goes beyond locating my frog; the field can be dangerous for many reasons: I may not hear dangerous animals—such as puma, collared peccary, or leopards—approaching; and I may lose track of my team if people call me from too far away. Even for scientists without hearing loss, it is advisable not to carry out fieldwork alone.

In recent years, I have had the opportunity to learn Brazilian sign language (LIBRAS) in graduate courses. I am happy that it is a requirement for my degree! When I am in the field I communicate primarily with gestures. I am lucky that my frogs are diurnal, because I am able to see my companions in the field, making communication much easier. Once my companion hears the frog, they look at me so I can read their lips or we make gestures so as to not scare the frogs. Sometimes I use headphones, point the microphone of my recorder in the general direction of the frog, and increase the volume to better understand where the sound comes from—this trick of using my main research tool (my recorder) to find my frogs was taught to me by a friend who also carried out research in bioacoustics and had the challenge of finding a tiny mountain frog species that hid in leaf-litter (thank you, André Confetti). My frogs are also tiny, only 4 cm long. They camouflage in the streams and spook very easily, but in order to obtain my data, I need to get as close as 50 cm from the frog. Only then can I really start. The aim of my work is to analyze the effect of anthropogenic noise (such as traffic road sounds transmitted by playback) on frog communication. Once I am in position, I can play the anthropogenic sound, and record the frog’s call. I take these recordings back to the lab and experience the most rewarding aspect of my efforts to find these frogs. The recordings are transformed into graphs of the frequency and length of each call. Although I cannot hear the sounds my frog makes, I can see them! After seeing the sound I can analyze several call variables and calculate various statistics.

Would I recommend field work such as mine to somebody who finds themselves in my predicament? If you are open to creative workarounds, such fieldwork is possible for all. Having a field companion, using signs to communicate, and making use of the amplification provided by my recording equipment has solved the majority of my problems. Most important of all, having support from your mentor and other people who can help and you can trust is crucial. I do not intend to continue with bioacoustics research after I graduate, but if I need to mentor any students in the area, I’ll be happy to do it. I worry about my hearing loss too, in thinking of how it will affect my teaching in the future, because sometimes I hear words incorrectly and confuse their meaning. But I recently exposed my hearing loss in an interview; reading more at The Mind Hears and on other blogs has inspired me to worry less about my hearing loss and to continue to forge ahead in my career.

 

Biography: My name is Michelle Micarelli Struett and I am a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Ecology and Conservation (where I also received my MS) at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil. My undergraduate was at Maringá State University in Maringá, which is also in Paraná. I am interested in animal behavior, especially in frogs, and in my research will examine multi-modal communication in the Brazilian Torrent Frog (Hylodes heyeri). This unique frog can sing from one or both sides of its mouth (it has two vocal sacs), depending on context. I will attempt to determine what that context is that stimulates those two possibilities (auditive, visual, or tactile), and how anthropogenic noise may interfere with communication and social interactions in this frog. Despite my hearing loss (which primarily encompasses frequencies above 4000 Hz), I have not been constrained from working with frog calls and bioacoustics.