Monday, October 31, 2016

ASL Lecture Series: Robert Sirvage

The RIT ASL and Deaf Studies Community Center (RADSCC) organizes community, national, and international leaders in ASL and Deaf culture and heritage to present free lectures at RIT for the benefit of students, staff, faculty and the community. 

Today's lecture was presented by Robert Sirvage and titled From stimulus to shared representation: Non-representational convergence as a foundation. The abstract for his presentation was "How and when are linguistic and other kinds of shared-representations formed? How does individual sensory stimulus lead to a shared-conceptualised world? This presentation will discuss these questions with a blend of insight gained from DeafSpace research and dialogue with DeafBlind communities about pro-tactile philosophy". Robert presented fascinating insights into the different ways that hearing, Deaf and DeafBlind people navigate space and how the requirements of representations of space (for example on a map) differs for sighted and blind people. You can see more about Robert's work in his TEDx Gallaudet talk An Insight from DeafSpace.

As a side note - it was amazing to see so many types of DeafBlind communication at the event. These included ASL, hand over hand communication, close proximity interpreting, and Pro Tactile ASL which is a new and emerging language within the North American DeafBlind community.

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