Maybe this is a literary trope. Maybe people need that fantasy, that hope for a rainbow.

I wrote BYE BYE I LOVE YOU because I believe people can find comfort in the real. This is how it's going to end. Probably in silence. Last words will be yours, not his. Also, terminal lucidity is very rare.

Ugh...Would be very interested in what you find out. Speech Language Pathology is in the process of becoming a thing in the Caribbean. Really hoping that we can convince people to build the field here on more enlightened principles, rather than importing more ableism and audism.

Thank you so much for this! I've sent it round to colleagues at the University of the West Indies, and hope that it will help us to come up with our own position statement.

And besides—what about the pool of human translators, especially deaf translators, who see mediocre AI taking over work they can still do much better?

Sharing bc: 1. Fahimah did a great project, and I want people to know about the work Caribbean students are doing; 2. one of the people in the conversation we analysed died recently; and 3. Jon Henner gave us the most Hennerishly encouraging review ever. Thinking of Florence and Jon with gratitude.

So, languaging in the Bay Islands community is multimodal. This is not a visual language on its way to become a "fully-fledged tactile language." It's a "fully-fledged" multimodal language, in which people use different channels depending on the interactional context.

It is also clear that tactile methods are not just a last resort, to be employed when one's interlocutor is blind. We mention that tactile signing is often used when addressing hearing-sighted people. It can be used for stylistic and other reasons (which we hope to explore in a future publication).

She documented a variety of ways in which the turn-taking was efficiently regulated, the most spectacular being the throwing of one's interlocutor's hands in the air to signal the end of a turn.

This article was based on Fahimah's undergraduate project. She looked at how turn-taking is regulated in a conversation between two signers from the community. Both signers were deaf-blind, though one had some vision. She found visual and tactile techniques were used in the conversation.

There's very little work on the signing traditions that have come out of small communities with deaf-blind people in them, particularly outside the Global North. I know of three communities in the Caribbean where Usher Syndrome has been relatively common & expect there are many more internationally

Deaf, deaf-blind, and hearing people have been signing in Roatan for over 100 years, using visual and tactile channels. Data for the paper come from a project I worked on with Kris Ali and Ian Dhanoolal with support from the Endangered Languages Documentation Project www.elararchive.org/dk0504/

Thanks so much for sharing from TISLR. I was far too tired after SIGN10 to think about going, but it's lovely to follow a little on here!

(Graeber 2015)