From the CBC:
“Deaf researchers are
advancing the field of science — but barriers still hold many back”
(Freshwater ecologist Linda
Campbell, one of the handful of deaf academics in STEM in Canada, examines
lichen from a polluted mine site with student Michael Smith.)
Deaf researchers are bringing
their unique perspective to the lab and the field. In a scrubby patch of forest
near Halifax, Saint Mary's University professor Linda Campbell and her master's
student, Michael Smith, squelch through mud, looking for lichens. The lichens
they're after can be used as natural biological monitors of pollutants from
former gold-mining sites, like this one. Smith lifts one piece from a branch. It's
usnea, or beard lichen, which the researchers can use to assess levels of
arsenic and mercury in the air. That's because it absorbs nutrients — and
pollutants, if they're present — from the atmosphere rather than through roots.
Campbell notes that there were once industrial devices used to crush
gold-bearing ore at the site where this lichen is now growing. The lichen is
absorbing mercury initially released from the ore many years ago, that is still
percolating out into the environment. "What took place 100 years ago is
still being reflected in the lichen," she said. Campbell is a freshwater
ecologist — one of a handful of experts in Canada who's studied how
contaminants move through ecosystems, and how to deal with them. But she's also
part of another minority. Campbell is Deaf, and uses American Sign Language, or
ASL, making her part of a group that continues to be underrepresented in
science. A report from earlier this year by the Royal Society in the U.K., for
instance, noted that while about one per cent of the population is deaf, the
percentage of STEM undergraduates in that country who are deaf has stagnated at
just 0.3 per cent for the past decade. And, a 2017 U.S. study by the National
Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes found that, overall, Deaf people obtain
lower levels of education than their hearing peers. In Canada, there is little
formal data, but, anecdotally, Campbell knows of only five other deaf STEM
university faculty members. Campbell attributes the underrepresentation to
barriers erected by attitudes among hearing people. "When science looks at that as an added
cost, and added labour, to include people with disabilities, they're not
recognizing the differences and the successes that can be brought — that
diverse thinking can be successful."
Barriers rooted in education
(AI researcher Alex Lu, who is
deaf, said that he faced obstacles in his PhD studies at the University of
Toronto due to the complications of getting ASL interpreters and instructors
who were inexperienced in interacting with deaf students.)
Alex Lu recently graduated with a
PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto, where he studied
Artificial Intelligence, or AI. Lu is Deaf, and uses sign language and lip
reading, as well as his own voice. Growing up, Lu says he always felt
comfortable as a Deaf person, but found that hard to reconcile with the
attitudes he encountered in his university education. He found people were used
to teaching and learning science a certain way — which didn't always involve
working with Deaf people or ASL interpreters. "I think I'm the first Deaf
person in my program. So there was a whole bunch of confusion about how you get
ASL interpreters and how they work in classes. There were a lot of professors
that had never interacted with an ASL interpreter, or a student that uses an
ASL interpreter," he said. "And then when you start looking into
that, you start realizing, well, here are all of the barriers in the way that
we've been educating deaf people." Some of those barriers can be traced
back to the fact that, from the late 19th century to the early 1960s, sign
language was often forbidden in education, as people believed it prevented Deaf
children from learning speech.
ASL often not built for
science Today, there are few Deaf researchers working in academia, which
has led to a problem: much of the technical and specialized language used in
STEM hasn't made its way into signed languages such as ASL. When there are no
signs, interpreters may use fingerspelling — spelling out each letter of a word
— or the sign for the word in general English, which can be inaccurate. Colin
Lualdi, a fourth year PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,
studies photonic quantum information. He said the lack of useful signs can be
frustrating and tedious for deaf students, and can produce misunderstandings. One
example was the term "degeneracy," which he encountered as an
undergrad. His ASL interpreter signed using the English word meaning to get
worse over time. In fact, in physics this actually refers to two systems with
the same amount of energy. "And by that time, I realized we needed a new
sign for it, in order to support the concepts that were being
communicated," he said. Since then, Lualdi has joined a collaboration
between Harvard University and the Learning Center for the Deaf to create signs
for terms in quantum science. One of the signs the team has worked on is for
electron; the current sign has an index finger circling a closed fist,
representing a nucleus. "It implies that you have an electron always
circling a nucleus, right? But that's not always true," he said. Instead,
Lualdi and other project members have proposed a sign with just the index
finger moving in a circle. They're now
in the process of disseminating this sign and others, as well as syntax the
project has been working on to improve communication of physics concepts, to
see if they'll be adopted by the broader community. Either way, Lualdi says
they've already made his own work as a scientist easier. "Everyone wins
when we have an improved framework of language and, and the process becomes
much more efficient."
Bringing a unique perspective
to fieldwork
(During her PhD fieldwork, marine
biologist Barbara Spiecker said her advisor was concerned that because she was
deaf, it would be unsafe for to work in wet and slippery intertidal beaches.)
Outside of physics labs, being
Deaf in science can present its own challenges and opportunities, as it did for
Barbara Spiecker. She came to love fieldwork while pursuing her masters degree
in marine biology. Spiecker, who is now doing a post-doctoral fellowship at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, said her experience as a Deaf
scientist, and a user of ASL, have honed her powers of observation, and
provided her with a different lens to view the natural world. "It's very 3D based, a lot of what I do,
and ASL is a 3D language. So often hearing people, when they research, have a
different frame of how they see and interpret the world, and what they
research. So, that's what I bring to the table," Spiecker said. But
Spiecker says being Deaf hasn't always been seen as a strength. For the first
two years of her PhD program, she was not provided an interpreter, which meant
she missed out on learning opportunities. Spiecker says she had to fight hard
to not have the cost of the interpreter pushed on her lab, which would have cut
into their research budget and discouraged them from hiring Deaf students. "That
was quite the battle — if that was allowed, then I wouldn't have got my
PhD." In fieldwork, too, she encountered attitudes that could present
obstacles. At one point, her work involved extended time on the seaweed carpet
of the potentially treacherous intertidal zone. Advisors and potential
employers expressed doubt she could be safe in the water. "I [was] like,
'there's really no difference, you probably aren't relying on your hearing at
that point, either.' My eyes are very vigilant in these situations," she
said."It just took a little education and explanation, to help them realize
there's really no difference."
The value of different
perspectives But Alex Lu says there is a difference in once important way —
in that Deaf scientists, by virtue of their life experiences, contribute
different perspectives. "The value of having disabled people in science,
and marginalized people in science isn't that you just want to get people who
are uniformly going to be superheroes or anything like that," he says.
Instead, he says what's important is that "we contribute perspectives that
are different from mainstream science." Back at the former gold mining
site, Linda Campbell says science is strengthened by having more people
contributing diverse perspectives, such as the issues she works on, challenging
legacy contaminants affecting ecosystems. "We're building many
lines of evidence for the research and the potential risks of the tailings and
how to manage those risks," she said. When barriers prevent Deaf
scientists from contributing to these kinds of challenges, she said, "you're
losing that whole group of people who have such intense, powerful skills that
can advance the field of science." And the fact that some Deaf
scientists have managed to work and advocate their way into positions working
on environmental issues and other aspects of STEM doesn't mean that the
barriers have been removed — instead, she said it should be seen as inspiration
for work that is still to come. "There are many, many more people
that could be successful and could contribute to science and make the planet a
more healthy place. But they just can't, because of those very barriers imposed
on them," she said. "'If they can do it, you can do it' —
that's not it. It's more that 'they could do it, so we can find a way for you
to do it, too.'"
^ This is a very interesting and
often over-looked area that people should know about. ^
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