Sites of silence: Deaf online communication in the time of corona

Plumlee, M.

When home confinement protocols dramatically reduced face-to-face interaction opportunities as the COVID-19 virus spread around the globe in the spring of 2020, a group of young adult Deaf friends in Kazakhstan created an online WhatsApp group called “Antistress” where they began sharing information and providing mutual support. Two themes emerged from the group’s 14, 000 messages posted over a four-month period: pandemic-related comments and comments stemming from the perspective of the lived reality of a Deaf person, i.e., from a Deaf culture perspective. Discourse analysis, augmented by the principles of the ethnography of communication, was used to analyze the data. The data suggest that Kazakhstani Deaf conform to many cross-national Deaf cultural norms, including proficiency in Russian Sign Language (RSL), their national sign language, concurrent literacy in written Russian, and awareness of RSL-using Deaf communities in other countries of the former Soviet Union. There was strong evidence of Deaf in-group solidarity and mutual psychological support as they dealt with pandemic-related uncertainties such as infection rates, lockdown measures, and government subsistence payments, in addition to the stress of extended confinement. © 2021 selection and editorial matter, J. Michael Ryan;individual chapters, the contributors.