German Sign Language and
Communication of the Deaf
Photo: UHH/Denstorf
18 May 2021, by Pamela Sundhausen
Photo: IDGS
We, the PhD students at the IDGS have managed to successfully acquire funding from the Graduate School to organize an International Sign Workshop, which we held together with recent graduates of the MA Sign Languages programme on 20.04.2021 and 22.04.2021.
The workshop was intended to enable the participants to exchange ideas internationally and to get in direct contact with other researchers.
With Dr. Robert Adam, we were able to engage a renowned linguist and deaf interpreter for International Sign as workshop leader, who led us through two instructive days with a great deal of expertise. In addition to theoretical basics on the structure and history of International Sign, the two days full of practical interactive training and targeted exercises in reception and production offered plenty of room for discussion and follow-up questions.
Special thanks to Dr. Robert Adam!
About the workshop leader:
Dr. Robert Adam
As a deaf native signer, Dr. Robert Adam is passionate about sign language teaching and research. His doctoral research focused on unimodal bilingualism and investigated how language contact between different sign languages is expressed by looking at different dialects of British Sign Language and Irish Sign Language and how they occur in Australia, Ireland and Northern Ireland respectively. He was for many years a Director and Teaching Fellow at the UCL Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL) in London, devoting himself to academic modules on British Sign Language (BSL), deaf culture and identity, and translation. He is also accredited by the WFD and WASLI as an interpreter for International Sign. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.