Transforming the Life Chances of Deaf Ugandan Youth Through Play

This project researches the embodied lifeworlds of deaf Ugandan children, focussing on the radical transformations in being, sociality, self-reflexivity and understanding that occur through sign language acquisition, including new modes of experience and expression, theory-of-mind, reflexive and abstract thought, and establishing new senses of sociality, identity, community and belonging.

Deaf persons are categorised through medical models of disability that define deafness as a lack or impairment relative to hearing populations (McIlroy 2005). Deaf youth experience delayed language acquisition and are routinely excluded from learning contexts and associated opportunities as many educational approaches foreground hearing and speech. Sign language is embodied and inseparable from performance, vision, movement and materiality, offering unique perspectives to reimagine and critique conventional modes of representation.

By critiquing dominant socio-cultural perceptions of deafness as disablement, and by developing co-creative practices grounded in the embodied, performative and visual capacities of deaf youth, the project investigates:
1) The transformation in being that occurs through sign language acquisition, including identity formation, knowledge, learning and understanding.
2) How child-centred practices based on the embodied capacities of deaf (visual and performative) might reveal new insights into the lived experience of deafness.
3) How to develop pedagogical approaches that are culturally appropriate to deaf ways of being, and recognises the visual and performative strengths of deaf youth.
4) The development of a curriculum, as both method and output, to investigate and understand the capacities and social skills of deaf Ugandan youth, including their interaction and integration with the hearing community.

This project advocates a collaborative, child-centred sensory ethnography that draws on the embodied understandings and ontological strengths of deaf Ugandan youth to emphasise their potential and develop alternative educational approaches that acknowledge multiple ways of being. The resulting ethnography aims to have interdisciplinary relevance, alongside theoretical and practical applications in terms of pedagogy, policy and rights.

Deaf Ugandan children's lives are shaped by a sociocultural discourse which renders deafness as kasiru ('stupid', 'unable to learn'), despite possessing equal intelligence. Most deaf Ugandans first encounter sign language and other deaf persons at school. Significantly, deaf students are taught from a curriculum developed for hearing persons. Signed language is inseparable from the body (Ladd 2003), performed, embodied and negotiated through 'visual-manual' signs (Bauman 2008). Consequently, by combining deaf communication's performative foundations, guided learning, play activities and visual ethnography, the project will develop a deaf-centred fieldwork context to research and represent the lifeworlds of deaf youth.

Play-based workshops that use film, photography and performance and draw on visual capacities will provide an inclusionary and child-centred learning medium for deaf youth. Alongside a written ethnography, outcomes of these workshops will be performances, photographic essays and films based on deaf youth's experiences and future aspirations, whose content will be shaped by the children, articulating their lived experience against wider sociocultural discursive framings.

This project will challenge the way deaf people are viewed in education by demonstrating that the only limitation to their capability is a limiting educational model that does not account for multiple ways of being.

This project requires me to undertake Difficult Language Training in Ugandan Sign Language and conversational Luganda (Uganda's national language).