ABSTRACT
Routinely excluded from many social and learning contexts, many deaf young people find the spoken and written word practical and psychological barriers, especially in terms of education, expression, and representation. By contrast, visual practices offer a deaf inclusive means of knowledge acquisition and relating to others that do not start from models of disability and impairment or the translation and adaptation of preexisting hearing-based pedagogies but instead proceed from people’s existing sensorial lifeworlds and ways of being. As such, this chapter responds to many deaf people’s embodied visual understanding of and practical orientation to the world and considers the educational and cognitive possibilities of using photography and film as means of enabling deaf children to understand and engage with the world in which they live. From this perspective, vision is not simply a means of seeing or perceiving but of interacting, intervening, and worldmaking, especially in contexts of elision, exclusion, and marginalization. Based on extended practice-led photography and filmmaking workshops with deaf young people in six schools in Soweto and Durban, the chapter considers how a visual orientation to the world can be a starting point to inquire into a diversity of issues—from the most playful to the most challenging of subjects—to facilitate new modes of thinking and reflecting on identity, society, and the body.
