Thread by @jahochcam

This open letter to the Springer Editors has been emailed to the editors in response to a chapter that included offensive language and highly problematic claims about deaf communities and signed languages
doi.org/10.6084/m9.fig…

cc: @SpringerEng @SpringerNature

Thank you to all who contributed, gave feedback and signed, which are too many to be tagged 😳! About 200 signatures. AND over the weekend AND during these apocarevolutiondemic days?!? Wow it’s things like these that keep me working...

Along with sharing the open letter which I hope can be the start of a template of a more general letter that can be re-used in similar cases, which hopefully are few and far between, and thanking everyone who co-signed, I also wanted to highlight a few things…

Work w the signed language communities must be done by or w the communities themselves. I invite the authors to reach out to their local communities, such as work spearheaded by @alimchandani, accessmantra.com, an accessible Resource & Innovation Centre of the Deaf, India

There are tons of resources about doing work with signed language communities as well as discussion about how such work should be led by the communities themselves. To start with @SLLS ethics statement (slls.eu/slls-ethics-st…). (ASL sign "community" from aslsignbank.haskins.yale.edu/dictionary/glo…)

Harris, Holmes & Mertens’ 2009 Research Ethics in Sign Language Communities (ASL version bit.ly/39BezDS) among other chapters and articles, & Manual for Sign Language Work within Development Cooperation (slwmanual.info) ... everyone add your preferred ref here!

One of my favorite researchers @BenBraithwaite recently tweeted... “structural inequalities of North-South academia, extractive research methods, inaccessible publication practices, etc are part of the problem, and perhaps part of the solution…

Deaf researchers from the South should be able to forge careers in their own countries, informing research discourses, training, and calling out this crap. The barriers to this are huge & deeply connected to the ways in which academic money and power are hoarded in the North”

That pretty much caps up the very reason why I make sure my work is accessible (online, captioned, alt-text, not overly technical, etc)

As @ThomasPeachLib eloquently said, this is not cancel culture but members of the communities & allies protesting work that shouldn't have gotten past peer-review & “doesn't deserve the time of a published refutation which would elevate it to a category of acceptable discourse”

Thanks everyone for rallying to the cause and I look forward to continued dialogue with you all.

FYI the Figshare link (doi.org/10.6084/m9.fig…) has been updated with an accessible document. Thanks @Krischi for helping me fix some accessibility issues! 🙌

@threadreaderapp please unroll