Donna West Author

Donna West is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bristol’s Graduate School of Education. She first trained as an Art teacher before becoming a qualified teacher of deaf children. In 2001, she studied for her MSc in Deaf Studies and then worked at the Centre for Deaf Studies (also at Bristol) as a lecturer in Qualitative Research Methods before gaining her PhD from the Graduate School of Education in 2009. She has published papers on qualitative and poetic inquiry, and on sign language poetry, most recently: West, D. & Sutton-Spence, R. (2012). Shared Thinking Processes with Four Deaf Poets: A Window on “the Creative” in “Creative Sign Language”, Sign Language Studies, 12(2); West, D. (2011). Deaf-Hearing Family Life: Three Mothers’ Poetic Voices of Resistance, Qualitative Inquiry, 17(8); Sutton-Spence, R., & West, D. (2011). Negotiating the legacy of hearingness, Qualitative Inquiry, 17(5);West, D. (2009). “Strong together”: Poetic representations of a Deaf-hearing family narrative, in M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, & P. Sameshima (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.