Being Understood

Deaf Interpreters, Embodied Language and Relationality

By: Kristin Snoddon

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Hardcover | 11 November 2025

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Hardcover
174 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.01 x 14.81 x 1.12

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Experiences of not understanding and not being understood during interactions are a pervasive aspect of life for many deaf people, so ensuring understanding becomes a moral imperative in deaf worlds and part of deaf ontologies. Through a series of linked applied linguistics studies regarding the primacy of text, signing songs, the mediation practices of deaf interpreters and Caribbean deaf epistemologies of language and understanding, this book outlines theoretical and methodological approaches to analyzing deaf people's experiences of understanding and being understood. These are grounded in a Continental philosophy of language and qualitative methods including autoethnography, interpretative interviews and phenomenology. The book explores issues surrounding linguistic and semiotic repertoires; access and affordances; orientation, sociality and power; and mediated communication. Ultimately, it reveals both the workings of epistemic injustice related to deaf signers and ways of understanding and being understood that extend beyond named languages.

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What does it mean to be understood as a deaf person? Kristin Snoddon asks from the borderlands of lived experience: deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing people as writers, song signers, interpreters, dancers, musicians. By illuminating deaf worlds of (not) understanding and (not) being understood, layers of alienation and shame are reshaped into sites of linguistic flourishing.

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