212 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
of an indigenous notion of unity in relation to flourishing by a deaf leader from
Cameroon’s Extreme North region during the WFD’s Deaf Human Rights and
Capacity Building Training project in yaoundé in 2011 and its collective enact-
ment in a community dance is illustrative of the potential of indigenous notions
(see Chapter 8 for further discussion).
For Cameroonian deaf people, the discussion of the papers that would result
from my research and include their life stories was surprising and empowering—it
sent a signal that their lives were worthy of being documented and respected, and it
was an opportunity, if not a literal one, to “travel,” to go out of the country, and to
tell the world about deaf people in Cameroon. This project is still in progress. The
project also taught me about the limits of research, of its outcomes, of the resources
available to a postdoctoral scholar, and of what research can do.
Reflecting on power inequalities involved in my study in Cameroon and the situ-
ation of research in contexts of modernity and development in a newsletter for the
Innovia Foundation, I wrote,As a visitor with an emancipatory project, I am placed in a history. In the in-
terviews, deaf people ended their examples of the corruption of government
and local leadership, the broken promises of white people, deaf Cameroo-
nians who moved to Europe and the United States and didn’t come back, with
the challenging statement: “And now you are here.” (De Clerck, 2010b, p. 6)My awareness that fundamental research, though feasibly helpful in some ways,
may not be able to adequately meet a community’s desire for “development” has
inspired me to further refine a participatory and community-based methodological
approach, and—with constrained means—to explore alternative ways of support-
ing the community. The presence of a large representation of the Cameroonian
deaf community during the first African Sign Language Workshop of the World
Congress of African Linguistics, which was held in Cameroon at the University of
Buea and which is described further in(see Chapter 8), contributed to information
sharing (see also Lutalo-Kiingi & De Clerck, 2012). I was also happy to contribute to
the fostering of South-South cooperation between Uganda and Cameroon. In a first
response to the Cameroonian deaf community’s request for sign language research,
Ugandan deaf scholar Dr. Sam Lutalo-Kiingi is documenting an endangered sign
language in the Extreme North region of Cameroon (Lutalo-Kiingi & De Clerck,
2015a, 2015c; also see Chapter 8).
The process of giving back to the community has advanced further in my post-
doctoral research with the Flemish deaf community, including the production of
an unprecedented documentary on Flemish deaf role models, entitled Ik Ben Ook
Een Mens (I’m a Human Being, Too).^18 The project was funded by the Flemish govern-
ment (Ministry of Culture, Sign Language projects), produced by a deaf-led NGO
(VisualBox, 2012), and included in the reader Gebarentaal Zegt Alles: Bijdragen Rond- The film can be viewed at http://www.signlanguageprojects.com/en and is discussed further in
Chapter 6.