Deaf Flourishing 29
communities), while connecting with and giving new meaning to mainstream
frameworks that can support their sustainability. An example of this is the poster
with the slogan “Keep calm and carry on signing” that was designed for Deaffest, a
film festival held in Wolverhampton, England, in May 2012 (see Figure 1.1).^3 When
I have shown this poster at international conferences, deaf audience members have
seemed to connect with it, so much so in Flanders that some members actually
distributed it among the Flemish deaf community and posted it at the entrance to
Fevlado, where it remains at the time of writing.
nevertheless, if the 2010 ICED statement is to become a tool for transformation,
we will need not only self-reflection, but also scope for practicing partnership and
developing methodologies that foster it. A number of trends underscore this asser-
tion: The long movement toward emancipation; current developments in educa-
tion and biotechnology; the alarming educational arguments discussed at the WFD
Conference on Endangered Sign Languages, as mentioned earlier; the promising- The origins of the slogan date from 1939, after the start of World War II, when the British gov-
ernment distributed a motivational poster that read “Keep calm and carry on.” It was rediscovered in
2000 in a secondhand bookshop, and in the recent global economic crisis, its message of persistence
has struck a chord that has extended across the United Kingdom (Reinecke, 2010). on the occasion
of the^ 60th (diamond) anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation on June 5, 2012, the queen
invited Britons to produce “Keep calm and carry on” posters and flags, which have since had all kinds
of humorous variations applicable to different groups, including deaf signers who used the zeitgeist
opportunistically to promote their language.
Figure 1.1 A Deaffest poster.