Dealing with death and learning sign language, courses on the first day of the Adeje Summer University
18 july 2022
The 2022 Adeje Summer University is running all this week, and the first courses today dealt with sign language and with dealing with death.
The sign language workshop was for beginners in this form of communication, the official Spanish sign language since 2007 used by the deaf community nationally. The workshop director, María del Carmen Rodríguez Jiménez, said that the language was also used by those who are on the spectrum, or may suffer some form of infant brain paralysis. Today sign language is used on many media, including many news television programmes and public events, where interpreters are used.
The professor did comment that she would like to see moves towards what has happened in Catalonia, where sign language is now included as a subject in colleges alongside other language options such as French, German, etc.
On dealing with death, Professor Alfonso García Hernandez said that until the Victorian era talk of sex was taboo, today it is death. He is running two courses during the week that discuss normalising conversations around death, something that is both natural and very upsetting for many. He will look at how people cope with losing someone very close to them and the rituals surrounding death. He says that today we are too obsessed with youth and beauty and trying to distance ourselves from the concept of death.
