‘A Turn Away from Stereotypes’: Moscow Hosts ‘Researching the Deaf Community’ Conference
On October 17–19, 2025, the third annual interdisciplinary conference ‘Researching the Deaf Community 2025: on the Periphery of Attention’ took place at GES-2 House of Culture in Moscow. The event was organised with the participation of the HSE International Laboratory for Social Integration Research. HSE University Vice Rector Irina Martusevich addressed attendees at the opening ceremony.
‘Today, we see cultural institutions driving conversations with diverse groups of people more and more often. As a university, we see it as our mission to popularise this knowledge. We must engage in researching such initiatives to identify effective key practices and scale them up. It is wonderful to see similar events now being held at many cultural institutions, with HSE University acting as either a partner or a participant. This gives me hope that more and more people will join this dialogue,’ Irina Martusevich emphasised.
The first plenary session, ‘Deaf Studies: Knowledge, Culture, Identity,’ was opened by Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova, Professor at the School of Sociology of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences. ‘I can confidently say that we are taking part in a new intellectual turn,’ she declared. ‘Moreover, this is not just a scientific turn; it is a social turn… A turn away from stereotypes, including those found within science itself.’
The plenary session featured presentations from several speakers: Filipe Venade de Sousa, Researcher at the JusGov Research Centre for Justice and Governance of the University of Minho (Braga, Portugal) presented ‘Deafology as a Legal-cultural Framework: Towards Deaf Studies at the Intersection of Law, Language, and Culture’; Vladimir Kolesnikov, curator of programmes for the deaf community of the V–A–C Foundation, GES-2 Culture House, and the interdisciplinary project ‘Researching the Deaf Community’ delivered a report titled ‘Community of Co-authors: Production and Dissemination of Knowledge about the Deaf People in Russia’; Reza Rezvani, Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Deputy Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics at Shiraz University (Iran) presented on the ‘Semiotics of the Self: Iranian Sign Language and the Linguistic Identity, Epistemology and Epistemic Agency of the Deaf People.’
The first day also featured a presentation of the study ‘Social Structure of the Deaf Community: The Relationship between Cultural and Socio-demographic Factors and Attitudes towards Subgroups within the Community.’ The session was moderated by Nikita Bolshakov, Leading Research Fellow at the International Laboratory for Social Integration Research of HSE University.
The third annual interdisciplinary conference ‘Researching the Deaf Community,’ held from October 17 to 19, 2025, focused on the diversity of life experiences within the deaf community, particularly those of unrepresented groups that rarely receive research attention, such as the deaf-blind, the late-deafened, and hearing parents of deaf children. This theme continued a conversation begun at the previous forum, which concluded with a discussion on the identity of people with cochlear implants.
The first and second conferences, held in 2023 and 2024, brought together researchers from several dozen countries. Over this period, the event has established itself as a platform for discussing the cultural and linguistic characteristics of deaf communities—both those that are local and those that are common to different regions.