Popular media outlets pay scant attention to the deaf community, and on the rare occasion that is does the reports are often clothed in raggedly mundane observations dressed up in hyperbole. Therefore, when I heard that a new documentary on sign language was being screened in Columbus, I was eager and skeptical at the same. “Voices from El-Sayed” is an honest and simple portrait of life in a Bedouin community in southern Israel, which claims the highest rate of deafness in the world. As a result, sign language is prevalent throughout the community, not just for deaf residents but for the hearing residents, as well, thus avoiding the linguistic isolation and oppression experienced by many deaf individuals around the world.

The movie is filmed deliberately yet passionately by a director that is clearly invested in this project. Oded Adomi Leshem is a young Israeli filmmaker from Tel Aviv, who, in his comments following the screening, demonstrated an admirable sense of justice, not only for the subjects of his film but for the Muslim Bedouin people with whom he interacted. The movie is mostly thoughtful and patient, and when there is action is almost always happens in the foreground, intensifying the visual scene. (Think of the more intense ausbergers-esce moments of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close but without the special effects.) 

Is there anything not to like about this modest and sincere film? With no disrespect to the film itself or its director, the film did not break out of the mold I’ve come to expect from popular representations of the Deaf community. The film is unreflexive at several moments, raising the viewers awareness that the film is not innocently made, but made through the eyes of someone who finds novelty in ways only a hearing person can. In one scene, the main character is sleeping in a room with a loud generator. The camera pans back and forth between him and the loud generator highlighting - in hyperbolic juxtaposition - the inability of the main character to hear.

The story of Oded Adomi Leshem's involvement in this film, which he explain afterwards, confirms this suspicion. He was driving through the desert and stopped off in a village at a bedouin grocer for food when he noticed children signing with one another. He was fascinated and followed them down the path, increasingly intrigued by what he might only have understood as gestures at the time. He later found out that deafness was common in this community and sign language was prevalent throughout hearing and deaf residents. He returned cameraless at first, and then gradually obtained approval by those residents to be filmed. Clearly his personal sincerity is not in question, but this kind of “ah-ha!” filmography is well-rewarded (okay, probably not that well-rewarded) in a society that is generally just ignorant enough about people who are deaf to be wowed by such self-congratulatory revelations.

The take home point for me is that despite decades now of academic research, ASL classes in college, popular movies and literature, religious programs in sign language, and K-12 mainstreaming, people who are deaf are still widely viewed as exceptions, novelties, peaceful savages, and canvasses for cosmopolitan (hearing) people to paint their anxieties upon. But don't let that completely dissuade you; we all have to start somewhere. And Leshem's movie is as good or better than most. Just please don't watch the movie and feel like you now "understand" the lives of people who are Deaf.

Just today I began reading "The German Genius", the industrial-sized history of German Kultur recently published by Peter Watson. At 856 pages it's the second largest book I own behind only Victor Hugo's burning but only half-engulfed Les Miserablés.

My interest in the book is motivated by a simple question: What is Germany? 

Since my initial exposure to German and after having visited Germany on more than one occasion, I am left with the impression of a deep fracture between the Germany of my American imagination and the embodied Germany of today. Indeed, my repeated visits to book stores and libraries in search of a history of Germany are always frustrated by the narrow but over-sold window which opens up (muddily, I might add) upon the years between 1933 and 1945. The awkward amalgam of American fetishism for the technologies of war-making ("Fighter Planes of World War II") as well as an undying obsession with the gratuitous violence enacted upon minorities in other countries ("Auschwitz: a New History") produces a cartoonish understanding of Germany. (In fact, one of the most popular graphic novels today is "Maus", a history of Nazi Germany told through a comic book mice.) 

I often try to imagine if historians reduced U.S. history to its corresponding exterminations and institutional racisms for the kind of popular public consumption that drives World War II literature: "Tools and Technologies of Slavery", and "Native Americans: The Extermination of Those People". This is no apologetic for what should rightly be a thoroughly condemning examination of the atrocities of the past. But I suspect, first, that such a narrow view of Germany misses important historical events (if you'll excuse a momentary lapse into historical fundamentalism), and second that a focus on World War II in Germany creates a moral landscape which valorizes warfare and justifies American aggression in its purported incomparability to the Holocaust.

Watson's claim is to deal directly with both the history of Nazism and German history without compressing one under the teleology of the other. It's a book I expect to take the better part of this year to complete. But having launched effortlessly into the first 100 pages of rewarding and well-composed text this evening, I expect the time to be worth it.

Two articles came out in the past week about transportation problems, and both present radically different analyses of the problem and the solution. The first is by Bill Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford. For Ford, gridlock can be solved by technological innovation – by getting cars to "talk to each" other (because that's the problem with cars these days, they're introverts) and by building smart roads. The other article, by Elisabeth Rosenthal, describes explicitly car-reducing changes to planning in cities like Zurich and Munich. This vision of the transportation problem focuses on the social aspects of mobility. I easily side with the approach described by cities in Rosenthal's article and I hope that someday U.S. cities will wake up and start building cities we can live in instead of building infrastructure to drive through. 

Here are excerpts and the links to the original articles.

Why the world faces a massive traffic jam
by Bill Ford
"We need smart cars and smart infrastructure that communicate with each other while using real-time data to maximize their efficiency. We also need to tie in innovative and unique solutions that in their own way address global gridlock."

Across Europe, Irking Drivers Is Urban Policy
by Elisabeth Rosenthal
"Around Löwenplatz, one of Zurich’s busiest squares, cars are now banned on many blocks. Where permitted, their speed is limited to a snail’s pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs can be removed entirely, giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any time."

***This entry is cross-posted from DeafGeographies.weebly.com on 05/07/2011. Please visit that website for more information.***

by Austin Kocher

I was reminded last night of an important reason why I believe this Deaf geography group is important.

I went to a Deaf mingle last night here in Columbus, Ohio for the first time in a few months. It was satisfying to catch up with old friends and to be social again. I am always amazed by the ability of such a simple event to create a Deaf space on a Friday night in the middle of an otherwise hearing pub. Beginning signers huddled together at tables hoping someone would come by ask them their name. (YOUR NAME, WHAT?) Eager interpreting students flock to fluent signers for a much-needed immersion experience. Deaf teachers and professionals enjoy a beer and full-on conversation after a week of working in hearing offices. Many people will live their whole lives in Columbus and overlook the rich spaces of Deaf cultural that coalesce and dissolve rhythmically each week across the city.

At the mingle, I met an interpreting student who was both excited and concerned about becoming an interpreter. She was excited about learning a specialized, socially relevant, cognitively demanding skill that provided communication access to Deaf and hearing relationships. But she was understandably concerned about being in a position where, as a communication facilitator, she would always be re-presenting other people's ideas and not her own. Being an interpreter entails both empowering others through communication and losing one's own ability to be recognized as a full and valued participant. It is a contradiction that interpreters regularly acknowledge and do their best to mitigate in their careers. Some interpreters move on to coordinator positions or find opportunities to teach or present workshops, while others mix interpreting with another hobby or professional skill. It can even be the source of vicarious trauma when interpreting in crisis-oriented environments or when witnessing repeated discrimination. Some leave the field completely and never look back.

Brenda Brueggemann at The Ohio State University writes about "inbetweenity" as a way of navigating the boundaries of identity which are practically fraught with everyday feelings of un-belonging. This can also happen to geography graduate students - like several of us on this site - who regularly have to give an account to our peers that, yes, sign language is a real language and, no, we are not spending our time 'volunteering for the disabled'. On the other hand, we must also give an account to fellow interpreters, Deaf friends and family members, and former workmates about what geography is, the relevance of geography to Deaf studies, and to somehow argue for ourselves that what we do is valuable for interpreting and the Deaf community.

When I was at the AAG in Seattle with the presenters (listed here), I was enormously pleased - as indeed we all were - to not have to start from scratch with each other. We mostly all knew sign language and had years of experience with the Deaf community, albeit in different capacities. We were, therefore, able to make real progress in thinking through the concept of Deaf/DEAF/deaf space and Deaf geographies. One reason (among many) that makes this project important to me, is that it provides us with a community of colleagues who can engage in real discussion about important questions. For me, it gives me an opportunity that I don't have as an interpreter: to make a contribution to the fields of interpreting and Deaf studies through my own signs/voice. 

As this grows, there will always be a need to carefully and respectfully articulate the diverse experience of people who are deaf, Deaf, DEAF, or any other identity we wish to claim for ourselves. We must be willing to address the basic misconceptions that people have about geography and about what it means to be Deaf - just as many of us once held those misconceptions, too. It is nonetheless important to have a place where we can do the work we seek to do in a community of colleagues. I hope that we can create such a place through this project, and that more will join us and challenge us through meaningful discussion in coming years.

I love the travel section in bookstores. Each thick, photo-filled guide promises a brief escape from the Midwest. I open the binding up wide and imagine it is a Boeing 747 departing CMH for a place far away. California! Mexico City! Morocco! This is what the travel section has taught us: travel takes place somewhere else. Not only that – travel demands expensive plane tickets, hotels, and lots of time off. 

I reject this notion of travel. Which is not easy to do when you’re living in the Midwest.

What I have adopted instead is a sense of being a stranger in one’s own land, of mystifying one’s own culture in a way that makes it new all over again. Take corn fields, for instance. There is nothing more boring that driving for hours through the great cornfields of the Midwest. But did you realize the unique, contingent nature of the Midwest farming economy? At no time in history has such fertile fields been systematically exploited to produce an excess of basic food, which is now exported around the world and used to make everything from soda pop to socks. These industrialization of farm technology in the midwest made possible the US’ own industrial revolution, freeing farm laborers to work in automobile manufacturing, finance, and higher education. I submit this to you: you can travel around the world and never see such a culturally and historically significant monument as the sprawling Midwest cornfields. Yet it is as mundane to us who grew up here as the crumbling Great Wall of China must be to those street vendors who sell vegetables in its waning shadow.

This is equally true of cities in the Midwest. In the past few years, Miranda and I have also adventured in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. 

We have also had the occasion of visiting Portland (Oregon) twice; Milwaukee; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C. (twice); Raleigh, North Carolina; and Wilmington, Ohio (countless times for family). 

I used to be fascinated with people’s responses when I told them I lived in Puerto Rico. “You live where? That’s amazing!” They would follow this by some remarks about how nice it must be to live near a beach or have year-round warm weather. This was all true, of course. But since I lived there, none of this struck me as particularly exotic. In fact, I often felt the reverse for my friends who lived in Columbus, Ohio. “You have sidewalks, you say? What’s that like?”

When I moved back to Columbus in 2004, I was determined to move beyond the nothing-to-do-here attitude and find creative ways to travel in my own flat, corn-bred part of the world. That’s when I started taking nearcations. 

Here are three great reasons to nearcation instead of taking a cruise.

You’ll save money

Lodging – You can get a 4-star hotel in Detroit for the price of a New York City hostel. No, seriously. Miranda and I scored the Omni Hotel on the river in Detroit for $60 a night on Priceline. We paid the same for Jazz on the Park hostel in New York City three years ago. 

Transportation – You can drive round trip to a nearby city for a fraction of the cost of flying to a more spectacular destination. 

Food – New York City has its Italian Village and San Francisco has its China Town. But have you ever tried authentic bratwurst in German Village in Columbus, Ohio? Or Hungarian cuisine in Toledo? Puerto Rican specialties in Cleveland? Middle Eastern recipes in Detroit? Not only can you find delicious, underrated bites all over the Midwest, you’ll pay a fraction of the price of a fancy coastal bistro. To top it all off, you’ll get down-home Midwestern customer service.

You’ll become a better traveler

The relative dearth of landmarks in Cleveland, Indianapolis or Akron can be to your benefit. To be sure, if the Midwest had a long-standing tourist tradition like Greece or Paris, you can bet we would find a valid way to make every street corner a monument to some obscure moment in history. (The first traffic light (Cleveland), the shortest road (Bellfountaine), and so on.) Instead, Midwest cities have scores of hidden treasures that you, the traveler, must work a little harder to find. I’m thinking of sunken gardens in Windsor, Junctionview Studios in Columbus, or the Andy Warhol museum in Detroit. Yes, you’ll have to do more poking around in the mud to find the gems, but you’ll become a much better traveler when you do make it to a major city. After honing my travel skills locally, I find myself much more capable of enjoying a trip to Frankfurt or Washington, D.C. For one, you learn the difference between tourist traps and everyday life. Secondly, you learn to enjoy the mundane experiences and feel less pressure to see it all. Lastly, you learn to appreciate that the spectacles which appear exotic to you, from the Eiffel Tower to the National Mall, are just part of somebody else’s daily routine. In other words, it makes you rethink what it means to be exotic.

You’ll become a more frequent traveller

Once you get over the psychological barrier that “there nothing to do in Columbus”, the nearby world becomes open to you as a potential travel destination. And since it takes significantly less planning and vacation time, any long weekend (or regular weekend for that matter) opens up the possibility of another adventure. Family vacations don’t have to wait until a single 10 day stretch in the summer; you can also take several trips a year. You’ll also benefit hugely from fewer administrative hassles. Being gone from your home for a two weeks is completely different than being gone for a night or two. You don’t have to put your snail mail on hold, you don’t have to set up an email response telling people you are away for the moment, you don’t have to get a house-sitter/pet-sitter/child-sitter, you can be confident your cell phone will work as expected, and you’re never far from friends and family in the case of a travel emergency.