Annelies Kusters is Professor of Sociolinguistics at Heriot-Watt University, where she has worked since 2017. She does ethnographic research, which means she learns from people’s everyday experiences and ways of communicating. She has carried out research in different places, including Ghana, India, and the United Kingdom.
Her work focuses on how people use language in real life, how ideas about language shape society, how deaf people connect across borders, and how sign languages are represented in media. She has also made seven research-based documentary films about deaf people moving across places and borders, and about how deaf people use language in their daily lives.