Data belongs to the communities

Traditionally when research is done on a community or their language, the final product is not accessible to that community. In order to confront this, we strive to have our research open, accessible, and citable to the ASL communities we collaborate with to explore the documentation of the ASL communities in the time of COVID-19.

Respect for language variation and trajectories (hence “ASL communities”) 

“ASL communities” is used here to acknowledge that language community boundaries are not fixed. We invite people who self-identify as members of the ASL communities. We see this as including and not limited to D/deaf, CODA, hearing, DeafBlind, and so on. During our project, we will respect language variation and different acquisition journeys. We will also work with the communities to document our experiences of living through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Diversity

We want our collection to reflect the diverse populations of ASL communities. Therefore, we welcome a diverse population. Individuals with varied age, gender, social class, ethnicities, and so on are welcomed to participate in this project. To avoid past practices of relying on middle-class, white individuals to represent ASL communities, we want to break from that mold and include a plethora of people from different backgrounds. 

Safe space 

In order to provide a safe space for self-identified members of the ASL communities and include a diverse background of individuals, no racism, sexism, or audism will be tolerated during any phase of the project. Discrimination, bullying, or attacking of any sort will not be tolerated and dealt with immediately (e.g., by facilitating the disruption to the session, removing offensive content online, etc). 

Bilingual and bimodal

Using a collaborative approach, we will plan to give space to both ASL and English. At times, projects dealing with ASL are done solely in English. This practice needs to be changed. Both ASL and English will be used and considered while progressing through this project.