Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt is Professor of Media and Communication at Malmö University, Sweden. She primarily teaches an international hybrid and flexible online/on-campus MA programme called Media and Communication: Culture, Collaborative media and Creative industries; and researches audiences, new media, and museums. Since 2017, Pille has been the international director of the European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School. She is a mother of three boys and an advocate for sign language.
What are your interests and hobbies outside academia?
Sometimes I joke that with three kids, one does not need a hobby as I already have three, but I do love reading, learning new things, board games and watching baking and cooking programmes on TV.
How did you start to take an interest in sign language, and how far have you been involved?
When our youngest son was born almost six years ago, we learned early on that he will face many challenges. Among them, doctors could not get an accurate reading of his hearing although he passed some hearing tests around age one, we were told when he turned two that he would quite likely be profoundly deaf. Additional investigations into Cochlear Implants (CI – technology that is implanted to hearing nerves and produces at least some kind of hearing) showed that his hearing nerve was never completely formed, so nothing could be implanted. This meant that hearing was never going to be part of his way of communication. That coincided with our relocation to Sweden [from Estonia]. It took us some time, but in May 2016 we took our first sign language classes and have by now spent more than 100 hours learning Swedish sign language.
It keeps surprising people that sign language is country specific and a natural language. As a natural language, it emerges when enough people get together (usually in schools) and evolves to support the understanding (mostly lip-reading) of the local language. This means that one has to know both the language the sign-language is built on as well as the actual signs. Thus for us, intensive learning of two new languages – Swedish and Swedish sign language – began.
Together with learning the language, the courses provided to the parents also include education about deaf culture, which has a long and interesting history, and activists fighting not only for the rights of deaf people but also for their right to their own culture and language. Realising that this is the culture and the future world of my child, which among other things, is endangered by the technocratic worldview of medical professionals, I became engaged with the cause with as much as my current workload allows. The problem that reliance on technology does not fit everyone has led to reduced availability of sign language classes, signing interpreters and signing education in the special needs educational branch.
Does this activism around sign language relate to your academic work on Communication? If so, in what ways?
I do not think I can really call myself an activist; rather I am looking at this issue from the perspective of a communication scholar. Sign language is a communication tool, and as elsewhere the negotiations between technological determinism/optimism and the real-critical views of the lived realities are quite different. So I have been thinking (and not getting too far with this yet), but overall, there is more research needed when it comes to unique communicative properties of the sign languages in general. There are some interesting aspects that have been addressed, but sign language is not only an interesting tool and subject for linguists. We as communication scholars should also care about the cultural, expressive and communicative properties of different sign languages that are connected to the parallel languages to which they have evolved to enhance, but all sign languages across the world have fascinating bodily and spatial properties too. These make the stories told in sign language much more visual; signing people, in general, are more expressive and also often more aware of their surroundings and more able to ‘read’ other people even when they do not speak. The spatiality and bodily dimensions of the sign language make it somewhat hard for me to learn as you cannot really write it down – or you can, but there is only some sense in it.
Thus, my work in communication shows me (I think) new problems in understanding signing people and sign language as a cultural tool. I think that this is also a point for further investigation, perhaps by me, but I definitely hope by other people too.
How does it, if at all, help you as Professor?
This is a hard one to answer – it makes me more aware of the diversity of the world we live in, it gives me more respect for the different challenges people face daily, but it also increases the need for me to be able to show how communication as a focus of research can shed new light on a political struggle. I think for me the learning has also been related to how ‘ableist’ we are in our research, and while I am fully aware that many people are fighting for the cause of diversity, I think in my professor position, I will need to take this idea of equality and diversity even more seriously.
Do you or would you like to try to bring other academics to this cause?
I hope quite a few academics are working on the issue, but I would really like to see more communication research coming out of this. It can also be that as I traditionally see and hear more mediated communication research, then there might be strong branches of interpersonal communication research already dealing with sign language, but my preliminary investigations have not really shown that to be the case. Thus, I would love to call on communication researchers who could be interested in looking at different modes of communication as a way to investigate the cultural richness of the human world we live in, to study sign language. Sign language should not be reduced to the status of a tool for communication assistance, but needs to be recognised for its richness and diversity and the unique cultural contribution it can have.
How could people who would like to become engaged in sign language learn more about it?
There is a Spread the Sign app, where you can check out some quite different sign languages, and think of learning about your local sign language – does it have the status of a language? Is it recognised? What kind of political discussions are there around the sign language in your country? And think – how is my research taking into account people with different abilities, different communicative needs and abilities?
Ana Jorge
Photo credit: Gabriella Liivamägi
