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Accepted Paper:
Translanguaging fieldnotes: observing Jordanian Sign Language (LIU) interactions and the complexities of Arabic orthography
Timothy Y. Loh
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
I reflect on my own methodological uneasiness about how to record fieldnotes on LIU interactions that I observed at a deaf cultural center in Jordan: in English, Arabic, or something else. Working through these complications of fieldnote-writing is crucial to thinking about voice and representation.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I reflect on my own methodological uneasiness in taking fieldnotes while conducting dissertation fieldwork on assistive technologies for deaf people in Jordan, particularly at a deaf cultural center where I attended events, volunteered, and took classes in Jordanian Sign Language (LIU, from the Arabic lughat al-'ishara al-'urduniyya). Questions of voice and representation become increasingly complex in such multilingual and multimodal spaces where many languages are at play: drawing on their own linguistic repertoires, center staff would interact with each other in a mix of Jordanian Arabic and LIU—and additionally, with me, the hearing and visibly foreign medical anthropologist, in English and, occasionally, American Sign Language. While conducting participant observation at the center over a period of four months, I struggled with whether I should record the interactions in LIU that I observed in English (my first language), in Arabic (the language of Jordan and to which LIU is intimately connected), or something else. If in Arabic, I also had to think about whether to write in Arabic script or in a transliterated form—which was made more complicated by the fact that, unlike in the Latin alphabet, where American Sign Language glosses and English words can be distinguished by capitalisation (e.g. HOME I-GO versus "I am going home"), there is no way to capitalise letters in the Arabic alphabet to distinguish words from glosses. I argue that working through some of these questions about fieldnote-taking methodology are crucial to thinking about broader questions of voicing and non-normative articulation.