Everyone Here Speaks Sign Language: An Animated Linguistic Ethnographic Film of École Gabriel Sajus

• In Event: Unapologetically Dramatic About Injustices: Anthro-Performances of Minoritized Children/Childhoods

Abstract

This performance-presentation features “Everyone Here Speaks Sign Language,” an animated short linguistic ethnographic film about the everyday school lives of deaf and nondeaf children integrated in the public school École Gabriel Sajus in southern France. École Gabriel Sajus houses the celebrated bilingual (Langue des Signes Française/French) kindergarten class for deaf students. Through animating the social and communicative worlds of deaf/nondeaf children and adults, this film aims to make visible multilingual-multimodal worldings otherwise invisibilized (Groce, 1988; Behzadi et. al., 2020) by immersing viewers into the material, sensorial, embodied, and affective communicative and community practices of the signed-spoken language spaces of École Gabriel Sajus.

With this animated short linguistic ethnographic film, I aim to further expand scholarship on languaging practices in semiotically diverse contexts. I do this by experimenting with animation as a medium and mode to make visible how language minoritized deaf children and youth make use of communicative and community practices as resources for navigating the multiple, fluid, and ever-emergent signed-spoken language spaces of bilingual classes LSF (LSF—Langue des Signes Française/French) and public, nondeaf Ramonville-St. Agnes school community of École Gabriel Sajus in France. I also aim to offer an animated portrait of how deaf students, as well as their deaf-nondeaf parents and teachers, think about their own and other children’s communicative and community practices. Classe LSF opens up possibilities for a dynamic understanding of the language and learning socialization processes of young bilingual learners through analyses of films from the study and ethnographic interviews over the course of nearly ten years with the teachers and supervisors overseeing classe LSF. These analyses of video data and interviews provided insights into the language and educational ideologies of the Ramonville-St. Agnes unique class, school, and community.

In my most recent work, I have been experimenting with multiple mediums and modes of scholarly expression (e.g., drawing, comics, photography, performance, animation). Inspired by feminist geographer Negar Elodie Behzadi and her collaboration with animation artist Kate Jessop for the award-winning film “Nadirah coal woman: An animated ethnographic portrait of a female coal miner in Tajikistan,” I have set out to experiment with animated short ethnographic film as a medium and mode for “exploring the use of visual, embodied and art-based methodologies in the study of issues around marginalization and exclusion” (Behzadi et. al., 2020).

This animated short linguistic ethnographic film features innovations in scholarship and analyses of language use that have expanded to transglossic conceptualizations of “language” and languaging practices. With the intent of bringing multimodality in from the margins in studies of multilingualism-multimodality, this animated short ethnographic film draws on Deleuzian-Bergosian-inspired Cinema and Media Studies, animation, and ethnographic film traditions (e.g., Deleuze, 1989; del Rio, 2008; Colman, 2011; Laurie, 2015; Roberts, 2019), in combination with linguistic video ethnographic research focused on signed-spoken language contexts to contribute to broader trends advancing the study of semiotic repertoires (e.g., Canagarajah, 2017; Kusters et. al., 2021; Boldt & Valente, 2021).

Author

• Joseph M. Valente, Pennsylvania State University