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Discussing issues around race and racism often leads to unproductive stances such as defensiveness, denial, guilt, blame, or dysfunctional silence. Effectively addressing these stances is crucial for productive debate and action toward racial understanding and the undoing of racism. While numerous scholarship and professional development programs focus on critical and anti-racist pedagogies in higher education to tackle these unproductive stances, overcoming dichotomous thinking (i.e., "us" versus "them") and shifting the focus from individual stances to more systemic perspectives remains a challenge. To address this challenge, this article proposes the implementation of "rhetorical listening" as a powerful pedagogical tool that generates new vocabularies and facilitates personal and social transformation. The article explores how rhetorical listening can be conceptualized and operationalized as a pedagogical tool in a cultural studies course, specifically encouraging students to reposition themselves when engaging with societal issues related to race, such as the Black Pete debate in Flanders.

This article reports on the representation and operationalization of interpersonal attention in complaint management by comparing business textbooks, service recovery research, and situated practice. While textbooks commonly recommend the use of interpersonal strategies when writing complaint refusals, service recovery research points toward contextual differences in this regard. We use an authentic sample of complaint refusals from an intercultural business-to-business setting to show that the decontextualized recommendations in textbooks are not always applied in actual practice and that this lack of interpersonal attention need not be problematic.

This study investigates prosodic modulation in the spontaneous canonical babble of congenitally deaf infants with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) infants. Research has shown that the acoustic cues to prominence are less modulated in CI babble. However acoustic measurements of individual cues to prominence give incomplete information about prosodic modulation. In the present study, raters are asked to judge prominence since they simultaneously take into account all prosodic cues. Disyllabic utterances produced by CI and NH infants were presented to naive adult raters who had to indicate the degree and direction of prosodic modulation between syllables on a visual analogue scale. The results show that the babble of infants with CI is rated as having less prosodic modulation. Moreover, segmentally more variegated babble is rated as having more prosodic modulation. Raters do not perceive the babble to be predominantly trochaic, which indicates that the predominant stress pattern of Dutch is not yet apparent in the children's productions.

This study investigated the relation between lexical development and the production of prosodic prominence in disyllabic babble and words. Monthly recordings from nine typically developing Belgian-Dutch-speaking infants were analyzed from the onset of babbling until a cumulative vocabulary of 200 words was reached. The differentiation between the two syllables of isolated disyllabic utterances was computed for f0, intensity, and duration measurements. Results showed that the ambient trochaic pattern emerged in babble, but became enhanced in words. Words showed more prosodic differentiation in terms of f0 and intensity and a more even duration ratio. Age or vocabulary size did not predict the expansion of f0 or intensity in words, whereas vocabulary size was related to the production of more even-timed syllables. The findings are discussed in terms of lexicalist accounts of phonetic development and a potential phonetic highlighting function of first words.

This article has been excerpted from "Introduction: Sign Language, Sustainable Development, and Equal Opportunities" (De Clerck) in "Sign Language, Sustainable Development, and Equal Opportunities: Envisioning the Future for Deaf Students" (G. A. M. De Clerck & P. V. Paul (Eds.) 2016). The idea of exploring various understandings of the relationships among sustainable development, sign language, and equal opportunities from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives emerged from a postdoctoral research project titled "Sign Language Communities, Deaf Worldviews, and Sustainable Development" that the author conducted with support from the Flanders Research Foundation from 2012 to 2015 at Ghent University, Belgium. Funding from the Flemish Ministry of Equal Opportunities, as well as partnerships with the European Union of the Deaf and Federation of Flemish Deaf Organizations, facilitated international exchange and the development of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives, the result of which was "Sign Language, Sustainable Development, and Equal Opportunities," a 12-chapter multicontributor work that, starting with this issue, is being reprinted in abridged form in the "American Annals of the Deaf" in 3-chapter increments. This excerpt provides summaries of each chapter of the book and discusses a shared view from which to approach sustainability: a perspective of learning.

This article has been excerpted from "Perspectives on the Sign Language Factor in Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges of Sustainability" (Lutalo-Kiingi and De Clerck) in "Sign Language, Sustainable Development, and Equal Opportunities: Envisioning the Future for Deaf Students" (G. A. M. De Clerck and P. V. Paul (Eds.) 2016). In this chapter, the authors illuminate Africa's enormous cultural and linguistic diversity. A third of the world's living spoken languages are used in Africa, which means that, on average, 40 or more spoken languages are used in each country on the continent. Much as Wolff (2013) has articulated the notion of the "language factor," the authors propose to formulate the "sign language factor" to illuminate hierarchies in the use of national and indigenous sign languages versus "official languages" in Sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on documentation of linguistic, social, cultural, and educational practices of deaf people and sign language communities on the African continent, the authors aim to work toward an understanding of the sign language factor and its impact on development.

More than 350 deaf/sign language community members gathered at six local deaf clubs in Flanders in 2014 to share perspectives about the future and formulate proposals for policymaking. This initiative, Flemish Deaf Parliament, serves as a platform of deliberative democracy developed through cooperation between Ghent University and the Flemish Association of the Deaf (Fevlado) in response to a question from the deaf community about participation in decision making. The name "Flemish Deaf Parliament" also resulted from this cooperation. The topics discussed in the Flemish Deaf Parliament 2014 meetings covered the transition from deaf schools to mainstreamed education; the transmission of the community's cultural heritage and social and linguistic capital; equal opportunities in (lifelong) education; increased social mobility despite barriers to access and employment; political participation; and older deaf people advocating for a better quality of life, peer contact, and services in Flemish Sign Language. These issues invite a range of possible answers and perspectives. To make sense of them, deaf epistemologies have begun to be explored as analytical instruments for gaining insight into the diversity of deaf lives and into multiple ways of understanding the world. As a first experimental initiative, Flemish Deaf Parliament has illuminated much potential for research on democratic practice in minority communities.

In a Flemish case study, deaf role models revealed a moment of awakening, indicated by the Flemish sign WAKE-UP. Contact with deaf cultural rhetoric made them "wake up," and deconstruct and reconstruct their lives, a process represented by a "circle of deaf empowerment." Flemish deaf leaders mentioned acquiring this rhetoric during visits to deaf dream worlds (in Flemish Sign Language, WORLD DREAM): places with ideal conditions for deaf people. Such global deaf encounters (Breivik, Haualand, & Solvang, 2002) lead to the "insurrection of subjugated [deaf] knowledges" (Pease, 2002, p. 33). Whereas deaf education had never provided them with deaf cultural rhetoric and was "depositing" upon them oppressive societal conventions (Jankowski, 1997), a common sign language (Mottez, 1993) and global deaf experience (Breivik et al., 2002; Murray, in press) in barrier-free environments (Jankowski, 1997) provided deaf ways of deaf education (Erting, 1996; Reilly, 1995). (Contains 3 figures and 1 note.)