This open letter to the Springer Editors has been emailed to the editors in response to a chapter that included offensive language and highly problematic claims about deaf communities and signed languages
https://t.co/2r9GEez5Ic

cc: @SpringerEng @SpringerNature

Thank you to all who contributed, gave feedback and signed, which are too many to be tagged 😳! About 200 signatures. AND over the weekend AND during these apocarevolutiondemic days?!? Wow it’s things like these that keep me working...
Along with sharing the open letter which I hope can be the start of a template of a more general letter that can be re-used in similar cases, which hopefully are few and far between, and thanking everyone who co-signed, I also wanted to highlight a few things…
Work w the signed language communities must be done by or w the communities themselves. I invite the authors to reach out to their local communities, such as work spearheaded by @alimchandani, https://t.co/jkTED650jx, an accessible Resource & Innovation Centre of the Deaf, India
There are tons of resources about doing work with signed language communities as well as discussion about how such work should be led by the communities themselves. To start with @SLLS ethics statement (https://t.co/S0qaWCeOwJ). (ASL sign "community" from https://t.co/LaJSCNWSPr)
Harris, Holmes & Mertens’ 2009 Research Ethics in Sign Language Communities (ASL version https://t.co/kWJhT5FJ7h) among other chapters and articles, & Manual for Sign Language Work within Development Cooperation (https://t.co/yS8NxXPShd) ... everyone add your preferred ref here!
One of my favorite researchers @BenBraithwaite recently tweeted... “structural inequalities of North-South academia, extractive research methods, inaccessible publication practices, etc are part of the problem, and perhaps part of the solution…
Deaf researchers from the South should be able to forge careers in their own countries, informing research discourses, training, and calling out this crap. The barriers to this are huge & deeply connected to the ways in which academic money and power are hoarded in the North”
That pretty much caps up the very reason why I make sure my work is accessible (online, captioned, alt-text, not overly technical, etc)
As @ThomasPeachLib eloquently said, this is not cancel culture but members of the communities & allies protesting work that shouldn't have gotten past peer-review & “doesn't deserve the time of a published refutation which would elevate it to a category of acceptable discourse”
Thanks everyone for rallying to the cause and I look forward to continued dialogue with you all.
@threadreaderapp please unroll

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I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):


The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹


Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹


References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹

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Trump is gonna let the Mueller investigation end all on it's own. It's obvious. All the hysteria of the past 2 weeks about his supposed impending firing of Mueller was a distraction. He was never going to fire Mueller and he's not going to


Mueller's officially end his investigation all on his own and he's gonna say he found no evidence of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Democrats & DNC Media are going to LITERALLY have nothing coherent to say in response to that.

Mueller's team was 100% partisan.

That's why it's brilliant. NOBODY will be able to claim this team of partisan Democrats didn't go the EXTRA 20 MILES looking for ANY evidence they could find of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election

They looked high.

They looked low.

They looked underneath every rock, behind every tree, into every bush.

And they found...NOTHING.

Those saying Mueller will file obstruction charges against Trump: laughable.

What documents did Trump tell the Mueller team it couldn't have? What witnesses were withheld and never interviewed?

THERE WEREN'T ANY.

Mueller got full 100% cooperation as the record will show.