Social Justice, Equity, & Inclusion Research

Initially supported by NTID's Scholarship Portfolio Development Initiative and more recently, through a grant from the non-profit organization Society of Family Planning, Dr. Tiffany Panko (Director of the CCL Deaf Health Lab) and I have begun to document the reproductive health experiences of deaf and hard-of-hearing women.

Using a mixed methods approach targeting both national surveys and individual interviews, our research seeks to improve our our understanding of the barriers deaf and hard-of-hearing women face in their reproductive health experiences.

Funded by a generous grant from Syracuse University's Engaged Communities Mini- and Sustaining Grants, I have partnered with the Monu Chhettri and Tamla Htoo of the Syracuse-based non-profit Deaf New American Org. on the project "Deaf New Americans - Developing Language and Sharing Stories." Learning the vocabulary and concepts needed to navigate educational, health, social service, and community systems are a huge barrier for many Deaf New Americans who arrive in the US from all over the world.

Our project targets these functional communication environments as linguistic touch-stones and start from these basic everyday encounters to scaffold concept and language learning. Once the functional language curriculum for teaching ASL and English to Deaf New Americans is established, we will measure outcomes and producenevidence-based programming to share with other organizations working to support Deaf New Americans across the US