Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Based on 12 months of practice-based photography and filmmaking workshops carried out with deaf children and young people across six schools in Soweto and Durban, this article investigates the educational, practical and cognitive possibilities of using photography and film as means for deaf children to engage with the world in which they live and the future that is yet to come. Aligning visual anthropology with deaf young people’s visual capacity offers a starting point to inquire into a diversity of issues—from the most playful to the most challenging of subjects—that would be difficult through language based approaches and ethnography. By using the camera, with its documentary, co-creative and storytelling potentials as an extension of eye, mind and body, I advocate for a use of photography and filmmaking that proceeds from deaf children and young people’s sensory lifeworlds and embodied ways of being, including their visual forms of socialising, understanding and relating to others. From this perspective, vision is not simply a means of “seeing” or of “sensory perception” but a mode of worldmaking and understanding that opens a unique ethnographic and methodological window onto deaf young people’s perceptions and anticipations of the future.
Source: Visual Anthropology
Author: Andrew Irving
Institution: University of Manchester
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: University of Oxford
OpenAlex ID: W4411234933