Deaf Aboriginal Access to Justice: The Australian Project that Almost Never Happened

by Brent Elder, Michael Schwartz and Karen Soldatic

Walking through the lobby at the Nordic Network on Disability Research (NNDR) Conference, Copenhagen, 2019, we could not believe our luck. Karen Soldatić was standing there with some Western Sydney University (WSU) colleagues. This was serendipitous. Just the week before, we had been discussing the next steps for our Deaf Access to Justice project that we were wrapping up in Northern Ireland.

From crafting research questions to providing opportunities for people who work in the system of justice (e.g., police officers, solicitors, barristers, judges, prison officials) to be educated on the best practices for Deaf access to the criminal justice system, the Deaf Advisory Group (DAG) was an integral part of the project. The formation of the DAG helped lead all aspects of the research. Its success in Northern Ireland validated our feeling that Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) could be useful in other locations in the world.

We wanted to enact a similar approach in the global South with local Indigenous peoples. However, unlike Northern Ireland where both researchers had spent significant amounts of time over the last three decades building up trust in the Deaf community, we had never been to Australia. At the NNDR conference, we asked Professor Soldatić if there was a need for CBPR work with the Deaf First Nations communities, and she informed us that indeed there was a dearth of literature about these communities. Professor Soldatić was open to the idea of hosting a project at WSU. So, we started crafting an overview of what we would like to accomplish with Professor Soldatić and her colleagues at WSU.

The first iteration of the project was intended to be a Fulbright Scholar Award that Michael crafted through Syracuse University. While ultimately unsuccessful, the Fulbright application provided strong foundations for a seed grant from Syracuse University. In 2021, we received the Collaboration for Unprecedented Success and Excellence (CUSE) Grant Program, and began planning the logistics of the program. However, due to COVID, we had to shorten the timeline and adjust the scale of the project. Now in May 2023, the project is in full swing in Sydney.

Our research team also consists of two American Sign Language interpreters, Patricia (Trisha) Schwartz and Ryan Wight. Interpreters are usually confined to facilitating communication between Deaf and hearing partners, but we saw value in including Trisha and Ryan for their insights on not only communication but also the content of the ideas generated by the research project. Also included in our team are Professor Soldatić and her wonderful WSU colleagues, Dr. Scott Avery, Deaf Aboriginal researcher, and Professor Azadeh Dastyari, professor of Human Rights Law in WSU’s School of Law. Guided by this talented team, we are conducting research interviews with Aboriginal disability organizations, including First Peoples Disability Network (FPDN), disability advocates like Patrick McGee who are not Aboriginal but work with Aboriginal communities, Aboriginal Deaf advocates and researchers such as Jody Barney, and legal professionals like Professor Patrick Keyzer, a constitutional and human rights lawyer and Dean of the Thomas More Law School.

We plan to present our emerging findings through invited guest lectures in WSU’s Institute for Culture and Society and the WSU School of Law. Following this work, we will solicit community feedback from a culminating disability community forum entitled A Dialogue about the Interactions between Indigenous Peoples and Equitable Systems of Justice: What Should Reform Look Like? With permission from the people involved in this research, we will share some emerging findings from this work in a future blog.