Sign language-medium education in the global South
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Much research regarding sign language-medium education for deaf learners has taken place in the global North, which has often been regarded as a source of expert knowledge about deaf education and sign languages (Branson & Miller, 2004; Moriarty Harrelson, 2019). This special issue focuses on education for deaf learners in the global South as a site of knowledge production. This issue highlights contributions from researchers and practitioners from the global South who study the need for, implementation, and progress of programmes for deaf learners that utilise a national sign language as a medium of instruction. The term “national sign language” is used by the World Federation of the Deaf to refer to one or several sign languages that are part of the linguistic ecology of a country (J. J. Murray, personal communication, December 3, 2020). While the global South is not a static category (Friedner, 2017), this term refers to histories of exclusion (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020). In the context of deaf education, the term also refers to sites that have been subject to certain “prescriptivist modernization programs focused on introducing global North models of deaf education” and global North sign languages and sign systems (Moriarty, 2020, p. 198).