Digital Opportunities Promoting Inclusion in Academia (DigOPIA)

Focusing deaf and hard-of-hearing students

At a glance

Project leader : Prof. Dr. Christiane Hohenstein
Project team : Adrienne Geiser, Larysa Zavgorodnia
Project budget : CHF 227'136
Project status : completed
Funding partner : Public sector (excl. federal government) (Kanton Zürich / Digitalisierungsinitiative DIZH)
Contact person : Christiane Hohenstein

Description

«Digital opportunities promoting inclusion in Academia (DigOPIA)» is a research project within the DIZH Fellowships. It deals with linguistic inclusion in the university context, focusing on hearing-impaired and deaf students. The project explores the repertoire of digital options available to students in higher education using observation data, eye-tracking and interviews. A PhD thesis is underway on processes of knowledge-building and perception of academic content in the lecture hall, during group sessions and online through the mediums of sign language interpretation and speech-to-text translation. The project aims to open up new ways of understanding and expanding linguistic capacities in the language of science, and ultimately seeks to find solutions all student groups may profit from. The intersection between digital transformation and inclusive modes of communication is receiving a great deal of attention in the field of accessible communication but has received little attention in higher education didactics. The project’s results will allow for concluding how different audiences use new digital tools, and it will provide an excellent basis for synergizing research on accessible communication, inclusion, and language diversity. The development of this area is dynamic and follows several years of research in Work Area 5 on Sign Language and Sign Language Interpreting in the framework of a 2016-2020 swissuniversities project that aimed at establishing a Swiss Center for Accessible Communication at ZHAW and Uni Geneva. The project provides the basis for future third-party funding applications related to digitization, inclusion, interculturality and linguistic diversity.

Further information

DIZH

Publications

Hohenstein, Christiane; Zavgorodnia, Larysa,

2023.

Accessibility and inclusion? : reshaping academic communication using visual-gestural modality [paper].

In:

18th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA), Brussels, Belgium, 9-14 July 2023.
Hohenstein, Christiane; Lévy-Tödter, Magdalène; Sowinska, Agnieszka; Bock, Bettina,

2023.

Reshaping interaction in higher/tertiary education (HTE) under the challenges of inclusion.

In:

18th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA), Brussels, Belgium, 9-14 July 2023.
Fries, Sabine; Finkbeiner, Lela; Hohenstein, Christiane; Marsh, Georg; Knoop, Susanne,

2022.

Barrierefreiheit in der Wissenschaft.

In:

DFG-Netzwerk Gehörlosengeschichte, online, 27. Januar 2022.
Hohenstein, Christiane; Zavgorodnia, Larysa,

2021.

Inclusive and barrier-free tertiary education for deaf and hearing-impaired persons in Switzerland [paper].

In:

23rd International Congress on the Education of the Deaf (ICED): The Power of Connection, Brisbane, Australia, 5-8 July 2021.
Hohenstein, Christiane; Stemmer, Petra,

2021.

Agency, participation, and inclusion of deaf and hearing-impaired students in Germany and Switzerland [paper].

In:

17th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA), Winterthur (online), 27 June - 2 July 2021.
Hohenstein, Christiane,

2021.

Participation through sign languages, AAC, and multilingual health care communication : where the linguistics of inclusion and intercultural communication converge [paper].

In:

Participation through Language: Actors, Practices, Ideologies. Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Winterthur, 25-26 March 2021.
Hohenstein, Christiane; Zavgorodnia, Larysa,

2021.

The role of sign language in tertiary education [paper].

In:

Jekat, Susanne Johanna; Puhl, Steffen; Carrer, Luisa; Lintner, Alexa, eds.,

Proceedings of the 3rd Swiss conference on barrier-free communication (BfC 2020).

3rd Swiss Conference on Barrier-free Communication (BfC 2020), Winterthur (online), 29 June - 4 July 2020.

Winterthur:

ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences.

pp. 14-23.

Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-3001
Hohenstein, Christiane; Zavgorodnia, Larysa,

2020.

Inclusive schooling paving the road to higher education [paper].

In:

3rd International Scientific and Expert Conference “The results of (un)supportive environment”, Zagreb, Croatia, 21. November 2019.

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