Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)
People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.
Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.
Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.
Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.
Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.
The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.
References
Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.
Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.
Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.
24 Invaluable Skills To Learn For Free Online This Year
Here’s an easy resolution: This stuff is all free as long as you have access to a computer, and the skills you learn will be invaluable in your career, and/or life in general.
1. Become awesome at Excel.
Chandoo is one of many gracious Excel experts who wants to share their knowledge with the world. Excel excellence is one of those skills that will improve your chances of getting a good job instantly, and it will continue to prove invaluable over the course of your career. What are you waiting for?
2. Learn how to code.
littleanimalgifs.tumblr.com
Perhaps no other skill you can learn for free online has as much potential to lead to a lucrative career. Want to build a site for your startup? Want to build the next big app? Want to get hired at a place like BuzzFeed? You should learn to code. There are a lot of places that offer free or cheap online coding tutorials, but I recommend Code Academy for their breadth and innovative program. If you want to try a more traditional route, Harvard offers its excellent Introduction to Computer Science course online for free.
3. Make a dynamic website.
You could use a pre-existing template or blogging service, or you could learn Ruby on Rails and probably change your life forever. Here’s an extremely helpful long list of free Ruby learning tools that includes everything from Rails for Zombies to Learn Ruby The Hard Way. Go! Ruby! Some basic programming experience, like one of the courses above, might be helpful (but not necessarily required if you’re patient with yourself).
4. Learn to make a mobile game.
If you’re not interested in coding anything other than fun game apps, you could trythis course from the University of Reading. It promises to teach you how to build a game in Java, even if you don’t have programming experience! If you want to make a truly great game, you might want to read/listen up on Game Theory first.
5. Start reading faster.
Spreeder is a free online program that will improve your reading skill and comprehension no matter how old you are. With enough practice, you could learn to double, triple, or even quadruple the speed at which you read passages currently, which is basically like adding years to your life.
6. Learn a language!
With Duolingo, you can learn Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, or English (from any of the above or more). There’s a mobile app and a website, and the extensive courses are completely free.
Full disclosure: BuzzFeed and other websites are in a partnership with DuoLingo, but they did not pay or ask for this placement.
7. Pickle your own vegetables.
Tired of your farmer’s market haul going bad before you use it all? Or do you just love tangy pickled veggies? You too can pickle like a pro thanks to SkillShare and Travis Grillo.
8. Improve your public speaking skills.
You can take the University of Washington’s Intro to Public Speaking for free online. Once you learn a few tricks of the trade, you’ll be able to go into situations like being asked to present at a company meeting or giving a presentation in class without nearly as much fear and loathing.
9. Get a basic handle of statistics.
UC Berkeley put a stats intro class on iTunes. Once you know how to understand the numbers yourself, you’ll never read a biased “news” article the same way again — 100% of authors of this post agree!
10. Understand basic psychology.
Knowing the basics of psych will bring context to your understanding of yourself, the dynamics of your family and friendships, what’s really going on with your coworkers, and the woes and wonders of society in general. Yale University has its Intro to Psychology lectures online for free.
11. Make your own music.
Step one: Learn how to play guitar: Justin Guitar is a fine and free place to start learning chords and the basic skills you’ll need to be able to play guitar — from there, it’s up to you, but once you know the basics, just looking up tabs for your favorite songs and learning them on your own is how many young guitar players get their start (plus it’s an excellent party trick).
Step two: A delightful free voice lesson from Berklee College Of Music.
Step three: Have you always thought you had an inner TSwift? Berklee College of Music offers an Introduction to Songwriting course completely for free online. The course is six weeks long, and by the end of the lesson you’ll have at least one completed song.
Step four: Lifehacker’s basics of music production will help you put it all together once you have the skills down! You’ll be recording your own music, ready to share with your valentine or the entire world, in no time!
12. Learn to negotiate.
Let Stanford’s Stan Christensen explain how to negotiate in business and your personal life, managing relationships for your personal gain and not letting yourself be steamrolled. There are a lot of football metaphors and it’s great.
13. Stop hating math.
If you struggled with math throughout school and now have trouble applying it in real-world situations when it crops up, try Saylor.org’s Real World Math course. It will reteach you basic math skills as they apply IRL. Very helpful!
14. Start drawing!
All kids draw — so why do we become so afraid of it as adults? Everyone should feel comfortable with a sketchbook and pencil, and sketching is a wonderful way to express your creativity. DrawSpace is a great place to start. (I also highly recommend the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain if you can drop a few dollars for a used copy.)
15. Make your own animated GIF.
BuzzFeed’s own Katie Notopoulos has a great, simple guide to making an animated GIF without Photoshop. This is all you need to be the king or queen of Tumblr or your favorite email chains.
16. Appreciate jazz.
reddit.com
Have you never really “gotten” jazz? If you want to be able to participate in conversations at fancy parties and/or just add some context to your appreciation of all music, try this free online course from UT Austin.
17. Write well.
Macalester College’s lecture series is excellent. If you’re more interested in journalism, try Wikiversity’s course selection.
18. Get better at using Photoshop.
Another invaluable skill that will get you places in your career, learning Photoshop can be as fun as watching the hilarious videos on You Suck At Photoshop or as serious as this extensive Udemy training course (focused on photo retouching).
19. Take decent pictures.
Lifehacker’s basics of photography might be a good place to start. Learn how your camera works, the basic of composition, and editing images in post-production. If you finish that and you’re not sure what to do next, here’s a short course on displaying and sharing your digital photographs.
20. Learn to knit.
Instructables has a great course by a woman who is herself an online-taught knitter. You’ll be making baby hats and cute scarves before this winter’s over!
21. Get started with investing in stocks.
If you are lucky enough to have a regular income, you should start learning about savings and investment now. Investopedia has a ton of online resources, including this free stocks basics course. Invest away!
22. Clean your house in a short amount of time.
Unf$#k Your Habitat has a great emergency cleaning guide for when your mother-in-law springs a surprise visit on you. While you’re over there, the entire blog is good for getting organized and clean in the long term, not just in “emergencies.” You’ll be happier for it.
23. Start practicing yoga.
Most cities have free community classes (try just searching Google or inquiring at your local yoga studio), or if you’re more comfortable trying yoga at home, YogaGlohas a great 15-day trial and Yome is a compendium of 100% free yoga videos. If you’re already familiar with basic yoga positions but you need an easy way to practice at home, I recommend YogaTailor’s free trial as well.
24. Tie your shoelaces more efficiently.
It’s simple and just imagine the minutes of your life you’ll save!
In addition to the link above, statisticshell.com is a FANTASTIC intro stats site, which is course material and links to lectures from Andy Field, who wrote the most understandable stats textbook ever! The book itself is fantastic, but unfortunately, the opposite of free. :)
Do you have any tips on how to choose a therapist or what to look for? The one I have now is feeling like a waste of time and aside from "are you in network" idk what kinds of questions to ask or what to look for from them?
Unfortunately I’ve never really been able to “choose” a therapist. They’ve all been kind of forced on me in the program I was in. So I’m sorry I can’t be of more help. Maybe one of the things to ask/look for would be what kind of therapies they are trained in? For example, I swear by DBT therapy for personality and mood disorders, so it would be worth looking for a therapist who’s trained in DBT if those issues affect you.
This is going to be awkwardly formatted from my phone, but two could-be-helpful posts:
How to find mental health services:
http://copperbadge.tumblr.com/post/115471691786/tumblr-dad-do-you-have-any-advice-on-where-to
How to set up an "interview" with a potential therapist:
http://triflesandparsnips.tumblr.com/post/107510453740/floozycaucus-how-do-you-how-does-one-shop
Her dreadlocks felt empowering – so why get rid of them? Read how she learned about cultural appropriation the hard way, and you'll learn how to be a better ally and feminist.
This is how you ally, white feminism.
Oh yeah, and fuck you Allure Mag !
This White Feminist Loved Her Dreadlocks – Here’s Why She Cut Them Off
August 2, 2015 by Annah Anti-Palindrome
I felt the societal pressures of womanhood come on like a plague.
It seemed like one day I was building forts and catching lizards, and the next I was sucking in my gut, picking at my face, and navigating an inescapable shame about my body – a shame that I’ve now spent the last twenty years trying to shirk.
I remember being ten years old and grieving my girlhood – that short period of time when I was allowed to exist without a preoccupation of my physical appearance constantly looming in the front of my mind – a time when my self-esteem wasn’t rooted in whether or not I was pretty enough, skinny enough, busty enough, sexy enough.
Time passed and the more unattainable and oppressive heteronormative femininity felt, the more I grew to hate myself and everybody around me.
In my late teens, I finally gave up. I cobbled together an outfit with layers suitable for all types of weather and didn’t change out of it for an entire year.
I let my leg and armpit hair grow long, and I let the hair on my head spiral into a nest of cords, matts, and tangles (a hairdo I would later ignorantly and appropriatively refer to as dreadlocks).
I ran away from home – started hitchhiking all over the country, going to feminist music festivals, entrenching myself amidst the company of other (mostly white) grrrls who were shirking their feminine hygiene routines (shaving, bathing, hair combing, general beauty maintenance regimens of all types, really) in order to really “stick it to the patriarchy.” (It was a thing, okay?)
We idolized musicians like The Slits, Babes in Toyland, 7 Year Bitch, Ani Difranco, L7, and Switchblade Symphony – all feminists who wrote songs about smashing mainstream beauty standards – all bands featuring white women who wore their hair in dreadlocks at some point or another during their musical careers.
What It Was Like Being A White Girl with Dreadlocks
In navigating through a predominantly white, feminist punk subculture, I never gave a second thought to whether wearing my hair in dreadlocks was offensive — at least to any one other than to The Patriarchy.
Having dreadlocks was part of what allowed me to stop obsessing over my appearance.
As long as I had them, the pressure – well for me as a cis gender white woman – to achieve mainstream, heteronormative beauty standards was off the table.
I suppose I felt empowered by this form of rebellious self-exclusion (the alternative being forced exclusion because I simply failed at womanhood).
While I did run into the occasional asshole on the street who called me a “filthy dyke,” my whiteness led people to read me as “quirky” and “alternative”.
I wasn’t followed around by security guards every time I went into a store. I wasn’t hassled by the cops for hanging out with my friends on street corners. I wasn’t hauled off to jail on the presumption that I was a gang member just because of my nonconventional appearance.
To further my point, being a white grrrl with dreadlocks, as well as someone who wore clothing scrappily held together by safety pins, dental fIoss and band patches, I was still considered employable and trustworthy.
Without any regard to personal qualifications, even with an incarceration record and no college education, I was often given responsibilities that put me in positions of authority over my co-workers of color.
Despite my rebellious appearance, I enjoyed a level of tolerance from authority figures and society at large that can only be attributed to my whiteness.
Everything changed when I stopped traveling, started investing in local activist projects, and began building a broader, more multiracial community.
For the first time, my peers had lots of questions and critiques about my choice to wear dreadlocks.
The responses other activists had to my hair ranged from mild irritation to downright anger.
People were constantly making comments under their breath when they passed me about “cultural appropriation” – I had no idea what that meant.
Some friends eventually suggested some readings and resources that would help me understand.
I read them and learned more about the history and symbolism of dreadlocks in the US in context to black folk’s resistance movements against white supremacy. I learned that black folks in the US with dreadlocks are not seen as “quirky” or “alternative,” but as “dangerous” and “militant”.
I learned to identify the ways that white colonist mentalities show up in our contemporary, everyday lives.
I realized that I was participating in the shitty reality that, for centuries, white people have felt entitled to taking pretty much anything their hearts desire – entire continents, human bodies, land resources, and, yes, whatever cultural trappings of the communities they colonized that were thought to be intriguing at the time.
The Harmful Messages I Was Sending to the World as a White Woman with Dreadlocks
It finally became clear to me that by wearing my hair in dreadlocks as a white person, the nonverbal statements I was making to folks of color were:
“Look! I can reject all of mainstream society’s expectations of me and still be treated with more respect than you!”
“Your legacies of cultural resistance are so irrelevant that they’ve become nothing more than a fashion accessory to help me evade the expectations of white womanhood!”
“I don’t care that my presence illicitness discomfort and sometimes communicates what is seen as blatant disrespect!”
“I don’t care that my hairstyle symbolizes the kind of white entitlement that has resulted in centuries worth of global, colonial violence.”
Etcetera.
I’m pretty embarrassed to say so… but even after this new stage of awareness I stiiiiillllll had a super hard time letting them go.
Some examples of my last stitch arguments were:
1. “Lots of cultures throughout the ages have worn dreadlocks! I’m part Scandinavian! My ancestors were Vikings!”
To which my friends responded:
Yes, it’s true that dreadlocks are worn in all different cultures around the world, but the context for which they are worn in the US is explicitly rooted in black folks’ (Rastafarians specifically) symbolic resistance to white supremacy.
When white people in the US wear dreadlocks, the power of this symbolic resistance is reduced to an “exotic” fashion trend wherein the oppressor is able to “play,” temporarily, an “exotic other” without acknowledging or experiencing any of the daily discriminations black folks have to face.
2. “We live in an intercultural society. Black women wear white hairstyles, so what’s up with the double standard?”
To which my friends responded:
Black women are told that in order to appear “respectable” in US society, they need to invest an obscene amount of time and energy into making themselves “look more white.”
Due to this fucked-up societal pressure – and due to the institutional power that white people have in determining mainstream beauty standards – it’s not the same.
3. “Nobody can control me! I do what I want!”
To which my friends responded:
…and you know what? You’re white, so it makes complete sense that you’d feel that way.
4. “By wearing dreadlocks, I’m giving up my white privilege to stand in solidarity with POC.”
To which my friends responded:
You are an oppression tourist – a white girl who always has an escape route back to the open arms of white supremacy once she is through rebelling. You can cut them off anytime.
To pretend otherwise or assume yourself a martyr is misguided and offensive.
5. “But there’s a difference between ‘appreciation’ and ‘appropriation’ isn’t there?”
My friends referred me to articles like these, saying:
I’m trying to think of examples of things I respect and how I show that respect. I’m actually struggling to think of a time when I respected something, and decided the best way to show that respect was by taking it. You know how I show respect?
I listen.
I listen hard, I listen deeply, and I listen constantly. I listen to stories, I listen to histories, I listen to learn, and I listen to hear when I’ve misstepped. I listen so I can become a more complete human being.
6. “But that’s not what I mean! What about the purpose they serve me?”
To which my friends responded:
Whether or not you mean to be disrespectful, the statements you are communicating are out of your control. Certain cultural symbols will always have semiotic weight – you wouldn’t wear a swastika pendant just because you thought it was pretty.
The Haircut
I finally cut them off – and when I did, I felt (literally and figuratively) a dozen pounds lighter.
Though I am still pretty “alternative” looking, I’ve learned to stand up against systems of oppression by doing the actual footwork in my daily life. I no longer naively expect my physical appearance (on its own) to do that work for me.
Cutting off my dreadlocks was a form of accountability – an acknowledgment of the ways in which I’ve benefited (and continue to benefit) from legacies of extreme, racialized violence.
Cutting off my dreadlocks didn’t make me an instantly “good white person” or even a trustworthy ally, but it sure as hell dismantled some of the barriers that stood in the way of cultivating deep, meaningful relationships based on mutual respect, trust and solidarity.
As feminists, we do need to continue working hard to dismantle society’s oppressive messages about femininity, but we also need to be thinking about the intersections of race, class, and gender, the ways some of us benefit from the system in which we live, and how we can empower and liberate ourselves without contributing to the oppression of someone else.
