![]() Windell “Wink” Smith Jr., an ASL performer and deaf community advocate, will emcee March 27's Wolf Humanities Center story slam, combining ASL and English-speaking storytellers. “To be able to do this in this forum, in collaboration with hearing storytellers, is a powerful symbol.”Īnd, more consequently, Wolf Humanities Center Director James English says, it’s an opportunity for the center to shine a spotlight on an increasingly popular culture of storytelling as live performance. “And since there’s no written ASL, live storytelling has always been a way that traditional deaf community values and stories-histories-have been shared throughout generations. “Typically, deaf people don’t learn ASL from families because most are born to hearing family members, so they learn ASL from their peers through schooling,” Fisher says. Moreover, she emphasizes, live storytelling is a highly cherished medium in the deaf community, thus adding further significance to ASL storytellers’ presence at the story slam. The partnership with the Deaf-Hearing Community Centre, based out of Swarthmore, was particularly helpful with ensuring minority populations in the Philadelphia deaf community are represented in the program-that those perspectives are heard in a way they’ve historically not been, due to systemic oppression from majority populations, Fisher says. “To imbue students with the idea there’s no one way to be deaf.” We try to be very sensitive when we expose our students to understanding what it means to be deaf and the historical experiences therein-but now, also, to understanding what was traditional is no longer. “These are people from all walks of life. “In our partnerships, we always try to think about how to make not just deaf-accessible, but deaf-friendly events,” says Jami Fisher, ASL program coordinator. But more importantly, it’s a unique opportunity to unite two sometimes-disparate communities on an even playing field. Interpreters will be present to translate the series of five-minute-long short stories and personal essays for both audiences.Īt a glance, the program is a universally appealing dive into the themes of rebirth and-perhaps especially-comebacks. On Tuesday, March 27, the Center will partner with the American Sign Language (ASL) Program in the Department of Linguistics, the Deaf-Hearing Communication Centre, and Kelly Writers House to present “ Rebirths, Returns, and Comebacks,” combining five ASL and five English-speaking performers for the Center’s first-ever story slam. The Wolf Humanities Center’s latest “ Afterlives”-themed event recognizes a shared thread of humanity among us all: We all tell stories.
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