Rethinking the concept of ‘subaltern-researcher’: different D/deaf identities and communicative modalities as conflict factors in in-depth interviews

Introduction

This article describes my process as a hard-of-hearing (HH) researcher who interviewed D/deaf participants regarding their everyday communicative use of smartphones in D/deaf and hearing social environments. Methodologically, 16 face-to-face interviews with HH people and one with a Deaf person were conducted in spoken Hebrew, while three Deaf people were interviewed differently. The first was interviewed using an Israeli sign language interpreter—his daughter, following his request—and the other two were interviewed virtually, using textual interviews on the apps Skype and WhatsApp. Written data transcriptions of these interviews were analyzed based on intersectional narrative analysis and the grounded theory principles (Strauss and Corbin, 1990).

This research process will be described in this paper regarding its complexities in the light of the researcher’s identities. As a congenitally HH woman who was born to a hearing family, I became a native Hebrew speaker with only basic skills in Israeli sign language. I have spent years trying to ‘pass’ as hearing (Brueggemann, 2010), in order to survive in an audistic world (Humphries, 1977). As a result, my identity has always been neither hearing nor Deaf. However, a specified HH identity (Laszlo, 1994) is controversial (Goldblat and Most, 2018), liminal (Welch, 2015), and rejected by both hearing and Deaf people (Beckner and Helme, 2018; Davis, 2007). The cultural and theoretical negligence of this specific sub-group motivated me to focus on HH participants, who make up 75% of this research population.

A specified HH identity challenges the cultural separation assumed by Deaf people between themselves and disabled people, based on their self-perception as a lingual and ethnic minority. This separation has been discussed as part of the cultural, medical, and disability models of deafness. It is marked by the separation in English between ‘Deaf’, which refers to culturally Deaf people who are part of the signing community, and ‘deaf’, which refers to audiologically deaf people who talk and are not part of the community (Young and Temple, 2014). While this strict separation may be problematic (Brueggamann, 2009), this terminology is present even in academic writing about different geographical contexts, such as Israeli society.

The Israeli context is characterized by a conservative disability discourse, which is dominated by bio-medicine and rehabilitation (Ziv et al., 2016) with special emphasis on widespread use of auditory technology and generous state funding of cochlear implants for children (Right, 2019). This practical minimization of the Deaf population, as well as the generally inaccessible environments and services for Deaf and HH people’s different accessibility needs, which are often in competition due to national accessibility regulations (2013), highlights my orientation toward the social model of disability. This model prioritizes the rights discourse over Deaf language discourse (Young and Temple, 2014) and is central to many Deaf and HH people’s shared experience of social disablement.

This local context is often reflected by Hebrew self-identifications as ‘hearing impaired’ or the Hebrew equivalent for HH, ‘heavily hearing’ (khvad shmiaa). I decided to use this term for this group. Here, it refers to interviewees who have dominant spoken communication, use assistive auditory technology, and do not identify as culturally Deaf. This term is used to both unify their various self-definitions in Hebrew—such as (cochlearly) ‘implanted’, ‘oral deaf’, ‘Hard-of-hearing’, ‘hearing impaired’, and ‘adult-onset deafness’.

Personally, I have experienced my deafness as continuous exclusion, disablement, and comparison to the hearing ‘standard’. However, I have always felt that the concept of cultural Deafness—and people who define themselves thus—erased my experiences in the hearing world, both good and bad, and my specified identity as HH. My use of assistive auditory technology enables me to be less dependent on others in the hearing world, who are often inaccessible. As such, I use the term ‘disability’ instead of ‘deaf’ when it comes to the current discussion on inclusive research methodologies.

In addition, my status as a first-generation disabled graduate student, who was educated solely by able-bodied researchers, made me to plan to perform an ‘appropriate’ hearing methodology in order to become an academic. This is true especially for the Israeli academy, which tends to exclude disabled students (Almog, 2018). It is linked to the generally ableist academic system (Dolmage, 2017) and specifically the inaccessibility barriers faced by D/deaf academics (Smith and Andrews, 2015), which highlights the importance of discussing the implications of methodological choices made by disabled researchers. While qualitative methods have the potential to express the voices of disabled research participants (Barnes, 1992; Berger et al., 2013), such methods may communicatively challenge disabled researchers, especially deaf/HH ones.

While methodological literature relevant for interviewers who are neither hearing nor signers is scarce, my experiences with Deaf interviewees challenged the notion of inclusive disability research through two main issues. First, it focuses on the body as the main research instrument in qualitative methodology, including its sensory, communicative, and cultural aspects, which are demonstrated by the unquestioned dominance of the conversational interview (Pinto, 2011). Second, this article highlights the potential inclusive input of the methodological perspectives of both Deaf studies and Disability studies to qualitative research practices in general. As such, some communicative assumptions regarding the data collection process made by hearing and culturally Deaf researchers who studied Deaf participants using sign language (Obasi, 2017; Stone and West, 2012; Temple and Young, 2004) may be challenged by deaf researchers (Shoham, 2011) due to the coexistence of different versions of being ‘deaf’ (Young and Temple, 2014).

This article includes reviewing aspects that must be considered while conducting a qualitative disability research with D/deaf participants, an intersectional reflexive analysis of my status as an ‘insider/outsider’, the implications of this partially cross-cultural research, ‘proper’ qualitative methods and academic written format, and the embodiment of ableist methodological bias. My position in this research raises two fundamental questions. First, how can I conduct research with Deaf people with whom I may appear to share basic social experiences, but who may actually see me as an audistic agent? Second, how can I support an extremely marginalized group through the use of methods and communicative modalities that are used by hearing researchers, who are part of an oppressive audistic system? These two questions will be further addressed in detail.

Considering aspects of conducting a qualitative disability research with D/deaf participants

When I conducted one of my first interviews, I sat in front of a fascinating interviewee, who provided extremely rich data. After a while I noticed that I wasn’t listening to her voice, but was instead using the well-lit room and comfortable couch in order to continuously lipread. This unconscious practice has been my natural solution, since childhood, for situations in which deaf people’s speech was unintelligible to an extent that made me refocus my efforts away from trying to hear and understand their voices and pronunciation, toward what I define as the external, visual ‘framework’ of lipreading. But this time, I found myself beginning to panic. The almost immediate transition from recognizing this practice to understanding its potential research implications occurred when I started to ask myself what the transcriber would do. Would the audio tape be able to capture this amazing interview? What would I do if it didn’t? And how could I make sure that it wouldn’t happen again in subsequent interviews? Practically, this situation concluded with a subsequent member check procedure, in which I sent the verbatim transcript to the interviewee and received her corrections and additions.

This example presents one of many situations that made me realize the extent to which I have to accommodate my chosen methodology to the interview space itself, as an HH researcher who interviews D/deaf people. This example also demonstrates the centrality of the disabled body to qualitative disability research. The researcher’s body, senses, cognition, and skills make them the actual instruments of data collection and analysis (Papadimitriou, 2001). This may challenge disabled researchers, and especially HH, due to the potential incompatibility between their body and its expected data production, especially in the realm of communication. The differently abled body produces different kinds of knowledge and communicative interactions, which places serious obstacles in the way of accomplishing research according to able-bodied practices and standards. At the same time, able-bodied researchers may find themselves in a narrative conflict with their subjects due to their perceived privilege (Hammer, 2013). Consequently, critical disability researchers face the dilemma of whether to position themselves as disabled or able-bodied (Mogendorff, 2013; Rinaldi, 2013). Disabling practices within the academy must also be taken into consideration. This issue may bring into question the ability, experience, and legitimacy of able-bodied researchers to study disabled people.

Generally, qualitative methodology is consensually important in critical Disability studies because it enables the use of interactional methods, which can provide in-depth knowledge of lived disability experience (Barnes, 1992). Moreover, qualitative methods enable a transformation from an impairment-oriented research question to an environment-oriented one (O’Day and Killeen, 2002), which supports the social model of disability. In addition, qualitative methods emphasize the researcher’s commitment to the participants (Denzin, 1989), which is presented by using bi-directional action, in which the researcher turns both inward, in a reflexive way that sheds light on potential personal and professional biases, and outward, in an empathic way (Papadimitriou, 2001).

However, studying disabled people is strongly impacted by the historical perception of disabled people as merely objects of academic research (Dolmage, 2017; Oliver, 1992). This context led to their negative experience as research participants (Mogendorff, 2013), not only due to able-bodied researchers’ tendency to study them from a positivistic perspective (Oliver, 1992), but also due to their failure to see disabled people as the real experts in such research (Mogendorff, 2013). This baggage echoes in a Deaf interviewee’s remark to a hearing researcher: ‘It’s not just about you just going and taking from Deaf people[.] That would not be right[,] you need to give something back. . .’ (Obasi, 2014: 71).

The current paper uses the perspective of the disability model of deafness. The present researcher’s narrative complicates this research by emphasizing the contrast between Ladd’s (2003) ‘subaltern-researcher’ versus a ‘researcher-elite’ as reflecting the gap that exists between seeing deafness as a culture and as a disability. This gap reexamines the hierarchical power relations between researcher and participant in cases of different auditory abilities and identities. This is particularly true given the unequal education opportunities for deaf people, which may diminish cultural representation of Deaf epistemology (Obasi, 2017).

This may account for D/deaf participants’ expressions of distrust and suspicion toward hearing researchers following negative past experience (Stone and West, 2012; Temple and Young, 2004; Young and Ackerman, 2001). In addition, their participation in a ‘hearing’ research might lead to a practical rejection of their language and culture (Stone and West, 2012). As a result, a ‘hearing’ study of Deaf people transforms into a cross-cultural one and might add a colonialist aspect to the process, due to this population’s historical medicalization (Ladd, 2003). Thus, a researcher’s hearing identity becomes a disadvantage (Obasi, 2014; Stone and West, 2012). In fact, in some cases, even a deaf researcher who was educated in the hearing academy may use audistic methods (Ladd, 2003). While this may be the case in a situation in which cultural deafness stands in opposition to an auditory disability, some urge that deaf epistemologies may be fluid and contextual (De Clerck, 2010). In any case, the identity, experience, and understanding of the researcher are important for the generation and interpretation of knowledge (Young and Temple, 2014).

Audistic perspectives might be encouraged by the great theoretical and methodological gaps in qualitative methods regarding disabled researchers. While accessible research formats for disabled participants have increased, such as mobile, social-spatial ‘go along’ interviews (Castrodale, 2018) and the use of Education Journey Maps (EJMs) in critical qualitative research (Annamma, 2018), the traditional perception of disabled people as merely research objects may be reflected in the fact that the research methodologies of disabled researchers, let alone HH ones, are understudied.

An ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’? An intersectional reflexivity as a major research tool

The importance of reflexivity in qualitative research is well known (Ellis and Bochner, 2000), well beyond disability research (Rinaldi, 2013). Reflexivity is crucial when the researcher is part of the research population to some extent (Berger, 2015). This aspect may encourage fluidity within the researcher’s status as an ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ (Roer-Strier and Sands, 2015), especially while sharing a certain disability with the participants (Sheldon, 2017). As an HH researcher, therefore, reflexive aspects are essential in the current research, especially given the tiny number of scholars who self-identify as such (e.g. Beckner and Helme, 2018; Welch, 2015). A possible explanation for this underrepresentation, which has a considerable effect on HH researchers’ work, is being part of a minority group, which suffers from great barriers and structural inaccessibility (Smith and Andrews, 2015). This academic position strengthens the dilemmas regarding self-definition in research and, more broadly, on how to make research methods accessible.

In the current research, I used intersectional reflexivity as a key strategy. Sharing a certain disability with a participant does not necessarily make a researcher an ‘insider’, but it does force her to examine her various identities and question them constantly (Sheldon, 2017). Thus, my reflexive writing included an examination of my interactions with the interviewees, in order to reflect the intersection of nationalism, gender, age, religiosity, and communicative choice. Thus, my other positions—a young, secular woman who is a Jew of Ashkenazi origin, who was born and raised in Israel, is a native Hebrew speaker and has almost completed three degrees at a prestigious Israeli university—locates me closer to the cultural hearing hegemony. It may reproduce the dominant power relations in Israeli society by certain interactions with interviewees, which were carefully described by reflexive writing. This writing revealed the moments and practices of which interviewees with similar auditory and social experiences emphasized other identities in order to mark me as an insider/outsider.

For example, during an interview with Rebecca, a young Ultra-Orthodox woman with a conservative lifestyle, she consistently shared her experiences in specific situations, emphasizing her identity as a deaf woman, rather than experiences of her religious life. Her identities’ fluidity and strategic focus on experiences that I could understand, as a secular Jewish woman from a completely different cultural background and lifestyle, made me an ‘insider’ and created a mutual understanding. My different position, out of her religious community, provided a space of very personal information sharing for her:

Rebecca: I need him [my husband] to accept so many aspects of my hearing impairment. For example, I sleep with my hearing aid. What for? Nobody will wake up at night [. . .] I don’t have a little baby who will wake me up at night, the kids are older now. Why should I sleep with my hearing aid? He wants me to.

Interviewer: Oh, just in case?

Rebecca: [Because] If a baby is crying, I should hear him, and if someone. . . I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s hard for him to see me. . . For example, if I’m here at home and sometimes want to disengage. Don’t you just want to take your hearing aids off sometimes?

Interviewer: Of course.

Rebecca: It happens. I want to take them off. But when I’m with him, I should always have them, both of them [hearing aid and cochlear implant processor] You wake up in the morning, then immediately put on your implant [processor]. It’s like, if I don’t put it on, he does, he just takes it, puts the processor on [my ear] or brings it to me.

Being an ‘insider’ regarding my previous knowledge enabled me to use the acceptable terminology among HH; I used terms such as ‘your hearing’ instead of ‘your hearing impairment’ or ‘hearing problems’, in order to reflect the participants’ sensory, emotional, and social experiences of different hearing. This strategy often produced a positive reference to me as an ‘insider’, using terms such as ‘we’, ‘you’, or ‘you know’ by the interviewees. It also led to my sharing lived experience with participants due to its importance for promoting trust and rapport (Ellis, 2004). As in Welch’s (2015) case, I have found myself interviewing HH participants whom I have known previously (albeit superficially), due to the ‘small world’ in which many HH people know each other from being in the same organizational circles as children and youth. The Israeli D/deaf community is small and strongly connected through D/deaf organizations, social media, and other ties.

Following the recommendation to interview people with whom qualitative researchers have established relationships (Ellis, 1998), the fact that I knew many of the interviewees previously encouraged me to share personal information, mostly regarding experiences of disablement by the hearing society, discrimination, and common experiences with auditory technology. These issues were also naturally raised during the interview as spontaneous developments of the interview protocol by both sides. However, given their great identity diversity, with some interviewees I shared nothing but basic auditory experiences. These participants often used various strategies to portray me as an ‘outsider’.

One strategy used by Samir, a Palestinian Israeli citizen, was making incidental remarks about the experience of being a deaf person in the Arab community, such as, ‘The awareness of hearing-impaired people within the Arab community used to be very low, unlike today, so the diagnosis would be given a little late’. These remarks reflected both my position as a Jewish person and our consequential hierarchy; the purpose of these remarks was to differentiate us through his (partly justified) assumption that I, as a Jewish person, wouldn’t be aware of these issues. This remark draws attention to the medical negligence of Israel’s periphery, and specifically to the absent national resources for the Arab sector.

Both Samir and Rebecca, in their own ways, used some of their identities in order to portray me in relation to them. By doing so, they emphasized the importance not only of our shared auditory experiences, but also of the gaps caused by our other identities. These active expressions of agency may be caused by their awareness of our essentially different bases of knowing a situation or experience. These bases, which are fundamental for understanding the world (Young and Hunt, 2011), differed according to given specific cultural, ethnic, and national circumstances. Therefore, participants’ power derives from their use of their social disadvantages.

Another strategy to portray me as an ‘outsider’ was using certain patterns of boundary work performance among people who differentiated themselves from signing Deaf (Bitman and John, 2019). This act was reflected in some of the interviewees’ self-comparison to other deaf people, and marked some line between those who are more ‘hearing’ than others, and thus enjoy higher status. This can be seen in this interview with Eran:

Interviewer: So how do you two [Eran and his wife, who is described by him as having a severe hearing loss] communicate today, now that your children are older?

Eran: I don’t have any hearing problems today.

Interviewer: And your wife?

Eran: It’s different when the kids are talking to me, because I don’t have any hearing problems. I can hear no matter what [. . .] You saw my use of the smartphone. . . [. . .] There’s absolutely no problem.[. . .]

So, [in] my interactions [with other people], [. . .] I don’t use telecoil ¹ or a real-time palantypist. I don’t have any problem [with sitting and listening] on the back or the front sides [of the room], whatever you want. I’m one of a kind in the country today, with that [hearing] level. It’s a miracle.

Though we were both considered HH, I actually became an ‘outsider’ due to my disadvantaged auditory identity. Possibly unintentionally, Eran referred to two accessibility strategies which I use—a real-time palantypist and telecoil—and which he knew about thanks to our previous acquaintance, in order to differentiate between us in a very nuanced way: an act of boundary work not only against Deaf people, but also against other HH. Thus, the examples of Rebecca, Samir, and Eran’s interviews shed light on nuanced practices used by the interviewees, which enable them not only to change the dynamic of the interviews but to clearly mark the interviewer as either ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’. As such, their reactions to my body, language, and identity become important parts of this research reflexivity. It also enabled other participants to clearly differentiate between us, while indicating our distinct positions and transforming our interaction into a cross-cultural one.

Cross-cultural research and its implications

Deaf participants’ identity strategies have become far more explicit and direct, mostly regarding their communicative preference during the interview and their cultural narrative. Thus, the various aspects of body, language, and communication made this part of the research into a cross-cultural one, between interviewees who are culturally Deaf, and an HH researcher. It created a new research, in which my identity made me, in many ways, a ‘researcher-elite’, mostly due to my complete incompetence as a ‘Fa’ signer.

Israeli sign language is commonly referred to as ‘Fa’ (signed with both hands’ index and middle fingers simultaneously moving quickly from up to down), which is perceived as a status symbol and a cultural anchor which represents a whole Deaf performance. ‘Fa’ marks the transformation to a completely different grammar, syntax, culture, and identity (Meir and Sandler, 2004). As such, people who are not fluent ‘Fa’ signers, like me, are not part of the Deaf community; as a result, I had neither a common language nor a mutual cultural base with my interviewees. Thus, if I had a potential starting position as an ‘insider’ before the interview, my recognition as ‘deaf by ear’ made me an outsider (Obasi, 2017).

In addition, my specific accessibility needs during the interviews were followed by my preliminary decision not to use a third person for communicative mediation of the interview—whether a sign language interpreter or a real-time palantypist—given the sensitive power relations in the interview space. Some hearing researchers have used these mediations during interviews with D/deaf participants (e.g. Dalumy, 2012). However, hearing people are often ‘outsiders’ (apart from culturally Deaf ones, like CODA), which is perceived as legitimate compared to HHs, who are perceived as ‘impure Deaf’ (Davis, 2007) and may represent an audistic ideal. Thus, the mediation may deepen the narrative tensions.

My choice to avoid from using a communicative mediation was similar to Shoham’s (2011), an Israeli deaf researcher. She conducted interviews by using both speech and Israeli sign language and documented them via touch typing on a laptop, rather than recording them on video. This was to prevent the interviewees from feeling discomfort in front of a video camera or from a third person’s presence, reasons which made me decide to eschew video recordings of my interviews with Deaf people. Interestingly, our preference not to use a video camera or interpreter is different from the common methods used by British and American hearing and Deaf researchers (Obasi, 2014; Stone and West, 2012; Temple and Young, 2004). These cultural differences may reflect the differences in the academic, social, and political contexts between Deaf cultures in these states, and Israeli Deaf culture, which is marginalized and weak due to the local circumstances.

Using professional interpretation specifically has received considerable attention in research with D/deaf people (Ladd, 2003; Obasi, 2014; Stone and West, 2012; Temple and Young, 2004). However, no attention has been dedicated to the situation in which an HH person interviews a Deaf person through the use, and presence, of a hearing person’s mediation. This situation may be conflictual, given the narrative difference between the researcher and the participants regarding the disability/cultural model of deafness. In addition, interviewees may be disconnected from the interviewer; the non-signing interviewer may not be able to look at the interviewee and maintain eye contact, which is central in Deaf culture. Thus, keeping eye contact with the interpreter may unintentionally indicate lack of interest in the Deaf interviewee (Young and Temple, 2014). This is significant when the HH interviewer is heavily assisted by lipreading.

In practice, the interpretation issue threw up barriers even before interviewing Deaf people, and caused multiple failed attempts to recruit culturally Deaf interviewees through snowball sampling and former deaf interviewees. Despite my unwillingness to use a sign language interpreter, it was necessary both for my accessibility and in order to produce a written data transcript. Therefore, I asked potential interviewees who had agreed to participate in the research to choose their favorite professional interpreter in order to make them feel as comfortable as possible. Yet as the recruitment process advanced, few potential participants ignored reminders and requests to assist me in finding appropriate interpreters. Others agreed, but many interpreters were not available at the time fixed for the interview, and it dissolved.

This process made me wonder whether, while attempting to enable Deaf interviewees to communicate in their own language, I put too much pressure and logistical responsibility on potential interviewees, which made them quit this voluntary research. I needed their help with finding interpreters not only due to my own unfamiliarity with them, but also due to the importance of the interpreter’s bilingualism, experience in participating in research or academic situations in general, or their connection to the Deaf culture or gender (Young and Temple, 2014). The importance of these factors was reflected by the only interpreted interview, which was eventually conducted in the current research.

This interview was conducted with a senior Deaf person who, after being asked whether he had a preferred interpreter, designated his adult CODA daughter. I arrived at his home before his daughter, and while we waited for her, we engaged in small talk, using lipreading and basic Israeli sign language, which required no communicative mediation for mutual understanding. When the interviewee’s daughter arrived, though, everything changed. My auditory and visual focus on her while lipreading stopped me from keeping eye contact with her father, meaning that I missed the essential kinesthetic nuances and sub-texts that are essential for creating good rapport with an interviewee (Young and Hunt, 2011). In addition, the daughter did not see herself as a ‘professional’ interpreter. Despite interpreting and relaying everything said by both myself and her father, she also actively participated in the conversation by making jokes and asking questions. These situational circumstances portrayed me as an ‘outsider’ not only to Deaf culture, but specifically to their own family dynamics. The interviewee replied to my questions with short answers, presumably owing to his unwillingness to share certain information with his daughter. Perhaps due to my lack of experience, I felt like a stranger and didn’t think that I could interrupt this dynamic.

Since it was my first interview with a signing Deaf person, I did not address these aspects after the interview with the father and the daughter. I took into an account the specific issues raised about the interpreter’s identity and the dynamic with the Deaf person, around my own presence in these spaces. Ultimately, this interview prompted a general rethinking about the research methodology as a whole.

It forced me to stop the process and ask: who am I doing this research for? It occurred to me then that I was conducting research mostly for the benefit of hearing people, using their language for both communication with interviewees and data formatting, in order to publish journal papers according to able-bodied standards. These ‘hearing’ methods obviously could not meet the communicative and social needs of my interviewees and myself. The use of a sign language interpreter by an HH researcher may be perceived as a severe, external representation of the hearing hegemonic culture. This loaded situation may position the researcher as an absolute ‘researcher-elite’ (Ladd, 2003). However, a comfortable, visually based communicative option for mutual understanding harms the depth and richness of each side’s full spoken or signed expression (Young and Temple, 2014), which leaves the only option of an interpreter. Thus, it is important to discuss the complexity of the situation with interviewees who want to be more involved in the research.

An appropriate solution enables the transformation of our communication into written text. The academic standard of using a written format of a spoken language in every knowledge distribution is problematic when it comes to sign languages (Stone and West, 2012), which have a tradition of unwritten documentation (Young and Temple, 2014). Transformation into verbal language, given the different syntax, grammar, and communicative modality, demands the use of a great number of words, which may conflict with word limits. It may also serve to oppress Deaf culture through the perpetuation of lingual hierarchy (Ladd, 2003; Stone and West, 2012).

Dealing with these issues reflexively illuminated my communicative reliance on the medical model as a potential bias. Therefore, after rethinking my methodological perspective, I decided to conduct the last two interviews by using online written chat on Skype and WhatsApp. This textual modality may limit Deaf people’s expression due to native signers’ difficulties of acquiring a textual language (Young and Temple, 2014). However, many Israeli Deaf users have explained that they preferred the use of textual smartphone apps in their everyday communication with D/deaf and hearing others, rather than sign language video conversations, due to insufficient kinesthetic intelligibility in video apps (Bitman and John, 2019). In addition, this communicative choice provided full transcription of the interview.

However, given the limitations of traditional, conversational qualitative research methods, sensory ethnography could be used. For D/deaf people, face-to-face interaction is always richer, whether sign language is used or not: it provides facial expressions, comfortable lipreading, and multiple visual cues. The communicative experience of Deaf and HH people may capture their communicative difference by examining the sensory aspects of their everyday life (Pink, 2009). For example, Rashid, a Palestinian high-tech worker, unintentionally presented his attempt to ‘pass’ as both Jewish and hearing while being interviewed in a large open-plan space in his workplace, by sharing his personal story in a lower voice while music was playing loudly in a nearby room, and keeping an eye on his physically distant colleagues. This context, which adds rich data to his answers, emphasizes the centrality of both sense of hearing and vision to Rashid’s internalization of well-learned strategies for coping with his social disadvantage. As such, these sensory data are highly significant for understanding everyday life as an HH person, in a way that sheds light on the methodological advantages of sensory ethnography in these contexts (Alper, 2018; Hammer, 2013).

‘Proper’ qualitative methods and written format

I had to constantly reflect the multiple overlaps between culture and communication in my research, in order to make the research instruments—that is, both my body and the research’s communicative mediation—as valid and reliable as possible. A key aspect of research validity is the researchers’ self-reflexivity regarding necessary changes in their attitudes and perspectives as a result of interacting with the field (Sheldon, 2017). This reflexivity enabled me to become aware of the ways in which my devotion to ‘proper’ qualitative methods and written format reflected my attempt to properly follow ‘hearing’ academic practices. These internalized perceptions of communication were inevitably medicalized, and exposed oppressive patterns in academic research.

This shift includes discussing an often-ignored issue: sign language and speech ‘corrections’. Israeli sign language is inherently different from spoken Hebrew (as well as other sign languages and spoken/written ones). As a result, I had to transform the data and the findings into written form, first in Hebrew and then in English. This triple translation aimed to produce research knowledge in ways that enable measuring my work’s academic quality as a graduate student (Young and Hunt, 2011), such as journal articles and international conferences in the global academy lingua franca (Jenkins, 2014). These academic standards may harm young d/Deaf scholars who are not native English speakers when it comes to their ability to distribute and publish their studies abroad. Their marginality is inevitable given the great difficulties of HH and Deaf students in learning English as a foreign language at school (Domagala-Zysk and Epstein, 2018).

Yet translating sign language data might harm interviewees’ messages even more: it changes its actual meaning. This translation has a considerable impact on the research, but insufficient attention has been paid to this practice and its implications (Temple and Young, 2004). For example, potential implications of translating British sign language into English may create meaning loss, impacting on the interview itself and on its analysis (Obasi, 2014) as well as the cultural erasure of sign language. From the hearing reader’s perspective, however, an excerpt may be perceived as inauthentic if it is not accord with the target language’s structure (Young and Temple, 2014).

That was the case of one interview that was conducted by using WhatsApp, and the Deaf interviewee wrote to me in Hebrew. However, the dominance of Israeli sign language as his main language often produced ‘signed’ sentence structures, which did not accord with Hebrew grammar. This was manifested in two main issues: the often-absent definite articles and possessive pronouns (‘parents’ instead of ‘my parents’) and avoiding the use of punctuation marks (‘And their harshness scathing when they ask me if [my] son is hearing what do they care’). From a narrow, prescriptive linguistic perspective, these sentences were ‘incorrect’, leaving me pondering whether I should leave his words the way he put them, or adjust them into ‘correct’ Hebrew.

While ‘corrections’ may generally harm the interviewee’s cultural representation, which is expressed by irregular grammar or pronunciation (Oliver et al., 2005), the current context raises an additional dilemma. The practice of double or triple translation of the data, in order to academically distribute them according to the norm of ‘standard, American English’ (Oliver et al., 2005), may acutely harm already-marginalized Deaf and HH interviewees. However, the current academy makes it the only permissible format for the wide distribution of neglected aspects of studying marginalized groups beyond the scope—and audiences—of D/deaf research.

This issue made me question my responsibility as a researcher who uses professional transcription services. In cases of interviewees’ unintelligible speech, I did not know whether my transcriber would write these sentences as they are or, as real-time palantypists often do, automatically correct them. Real-time palantypists work under time pressure in providing deaf or HH attendees the maximal number of words said during a meeting, lecture, and so on, in the shortest time, often using automatic apps to avoid spelling mistakes. A transcriber, in contrast, works alone, in a quiet room, with the time and space to repeat the words over and over again in order to make sure they are written accurately. As such, she would definitely notice mistakes and could choose to leave them as they are. This context put me into a position of authority as the researcher, who has to make sure that the transcriber understands that our relationship had changed: I was longer just another HH client, but also a researcher who had to make decisions over her research.

Critical disability research as a reflection of ableist methodological bias

The two fundamental questions asked at the beginning of this article regarding my position in my research as having a questionable ‘subaltern-researcher’ status, and its conjunction with my methodology, raise the importance of reflexivity and lived experience of oppression as key concepts. Critical research is not as inclusive when it ends, as demonstrated by inaccessible academic conferences (Sheldon, 2017) and the great career barriers faced by d/Deaf academics (Smith and Andrews, 2015). Thus, as a disabled scholar, I chose to prioritize my research participants as part of an activist act, in order to position them, and myself, as legitimate members of the academic space. This allows non-hegemonic communicative modalities to gain higher legitimacy as research instruments, in order to make academic research accessible.

An important strategy is comprehensive reflexive writing after each interview, and 1 month after the last interview. Writing personal experiences of interviewees’ comments on how good or bad my hearing is, what my identity really is in relation not only to my hearing status but also my age, gender, Jewish nationality and my status as a secular woman, how good my speech is in relation to other people, and references to my accessibility needs, enabled me to position myself in the interview space. This reflexive writing improves the researcher’s body as the research tool, by gaining a deeper awareness of how this body is perceived, communicates, functions, and affects the interviewees.

This strategy also enables understanding of the strength of ableist and audistic norms in the participants’ everyday lives, by understanding how they medically grade the functioning of my communicative body. This aspect, as well as my need to use certain communicative patterns in order to produce data and findings which are in line with traditional hearing academic standards, inevitably reveal the core practices of qualitative interviews as ableist. Given the fact of academic ableism, it is important to shed light on the often-ignored aspects of communicatively different interactions in research.

Therefore, discussing the core issues of reflexivity, research methods, and intersectionality has to take into an account the researcher’s body, senses, bodily narratives, mediation, her dominant communicative modality, and the psychological implications of being marked as having an ‘another’ physical function. All of these are integral parts of the research process, data collection, analysis, findings, and their distribution and publication. In addition, despite the increasingly comprehensive control of research participants over the meanings of its findings, knowledge production, and in many cases validity, translation into other language/s may still harm participants’ agency. This is true for both lingual ‘corrections’ in the transformation from sign language grammar, or the double-phased process of interpretation and translation from signed language to two spoken ones, which may reflect ableist perspectives on appreciating research validity.

Conclusions

This article presented various complexities regarding the nuanced and often tense interview situation between a researcher and a participant who are both d/Deaf. As demonstrated in this article, the researcher’s body, its function, and narrative perception by the interviewees create certain dynamics, strategies, and communicative identities in their interaction. HH participants may differentiate themselves from the interviewer due to intersectional or auditory narratives, or, rather, emphasize their mutual lived auditory experiences on account of other identities. Their variety of practices demonstrates their agency and their considerable control in the situation. Their room for maneuver is big enough to not only make their arguments clear, but also to highlight the often-ignored nuanced tensions under the surface.

These dynamics offer a richer understanding of the ‘subaltern-researcher’ concept. The enormous variety of identities, narratives, and self-perceptions regarding interviewees’ auditory identity, which are fully present in every moment of the interview, led them to use different strategies according to their desired image. While this conclusion strongly supports the unique ability of qualitative methodology to grasp such nuanced practices, it also leaves a significant gap regarding its limitations. These limitations are clearly presented during the conflictual cross-cultural interviews with Deaf participants, which demonstrates the core complexity of the ‘subaltern-researcher’ when it comes to the widely neglected nature of the specific HH identity. The local context of the current research creates inherently different power dynamics from the Anglo-Saxon political, academic, and discursive power given to culturally Deaf people as both researchers and participants in qualitative research. As such, the enormous gap between the perception of deafness as a disability and the perception of Deafness as a lingual and cultural minority is intensified when it comes to an HH graduate student who interviews Deaf people within the conservative Israeli ableist and audistic environment.

This gap is evident not only in the scarce methodological guidelines written in languages other than English and based on different cultural and geographical contexts, but also in the ignorance of non-signing deaf people. As such, this article provides an important perspective on the various complexities of this group while conducting research, due to different models of deafness, narratives, communicative modalities—and research purposes. As such, it sheds light on the ‘gray’ area of communicative research, made by those who are neither signers nor hearing. Ironically, this gray area emphasizes the strong audistic aspect that is interwoven into qualitative research on d/Deaf people. A major implication is the often taken-for-granted need to interpret sign language into spoken language, a process that practically includes the superficial and artificial transformation from a visual and motioned communication modality to an auditory one. This transformation not only changes the interviewee’s message, voice, and agency to a significant extent, but often imposes practices of language ‘corrections’ in order to make research on a marginalized group accessible for the hegemony.

These issues, which challenge the ability and legitimacy of qualitative methodology to provide full expression to marginalized groups, are critical in the contexts of both dis/abled researchers and participants, before, during, and after the research. Making the research accessible may come at the expense of the already-disadvantaged research participants, but qualitative methodology also reflects the great gap between various accessible methods for disabled participants and the considerable specific pressures on disabled researchers in general, and HH researchers in particular. This perspective is important in order to make this methodology as rich and emancipatory as it is intended to be, and should be.