Reflections of a Deaf Scholar 213
Gebarentaal en Diversiteit Vanuit Emancipatorisch Perspectief (Sign Language Says It All:
Contributions on Sign Language and Diversity From an Emancipatory Perspective), which
was assembled by Rik pinxten and myself (De Clerck & pinxten, 2012b) and in
which authors from Flanders and the Netherlands explore how sign language can
be more widely exploited in all realms of life. Both were presented at seminars and
workshops organized by Ghent University in cooperation with Fevlado and Ago-
ra-Kring, an NGO that promotes participatory citizenship and diversity.
Events in recent years have paved the way for a wider range of opportunities and
alternative future perspectives in Flanders, as well as for more ambitious endeavors.
The documentary illustrates that actively looking for and giving chances does make
a difference in a society where deaf people are still structurally limited. By facilitat-
ing the exchange of life stories, experiences, and views, the documentary aims to
provide space for the discussion of barriers, difficult times, alternative life trajecto-
ries, and dreams, as well as personal encounters, support, and connections tending
toward a more decent society in which deaf people can live up to their potential.
Experimenting with new ways to disseminate academic information among sign
language community members, I worked on a video translation of an opinion paper
I had written that was published on a national news website (De Clerck, 2013c). In
the paper, I discussed the expansion of interpreting hours for kindergarten students
in Flanders, which was the result of a judicial process initiated by the deaf parents
of a deaf child that was based on the UN Convention on the Rights of persons with
Disabilities and that advanced a conception of learning that was intercultural and
multilingual (see Chapter 1). The translation was in collaboration with VisualBox
and included film and visual materials. The exploration of Flemish Deaf parliament
in Chapter 6 is another example of research and community engagement.
Although limited in reach, my practice of giving back knowledge to the commu-
nity through dialogue while actively searching for seeds of potential growth could
be viewed as a process of finding meaning in knowledge transmission. This process
is described eloquently by paul Stoller (2009) who, as discussed earlier, gained an
existential perspective on life after being inspired by the path of his sorcery tutor.
Aware of the limits that illness places on our opportunity to make the best of our
time here, Stoller nonetheless found meaning: “A central mission in life is to con-
tribute knowledge—whatever that may be or entail—to our families, friends, col-
leagues, and communities” (p. 150). The experience of having his cancer go into
remission, with all its uncertainty and liminality, also inspired him to reconfigure his
understanding of the field of anthropology and its epistemological views:As participants in and witnesses to social life, we are obliged to choose any
number of genres—essays, ethnography, film, photography, poetry, fiction,
and art—that make our stories accessible to a wide range of audiences....
Getting to this point of reconfiguration demands that we take epistemological
risks to meet the complex and ever-shifting challenges of the contemporary
world. (p. 153)In this chapter, I have worked toward greater transparency in the process of knowl-
edge production by exploring the ethnographic self as a resource; analyzing the