Performing Visual Empowerment: Norwegian Youth Culture, Languages, and Cross-Sense Communication

Abstract

This article highlights how deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing people in Norway have an ability for visual languaging, building new relations, making new social order, handling the pressure of phonocentricity, establishing a peer group, and performing their visual identity in multiple ways. In a cross-field analysis of linguistics, medicine and anthropology, we explore how young people succeed in bridging the gap between users of spoken and of signed languages. By multiple video layered recordings as part of the ethnography, we display the complexities in their languaging. Our findings point to their broad use of different knowledge fields which are established from an early age.

Notes

1 Most countries have their own national sign language. In this article “Sign Language” only refers to Norwegian Sign Language. For a brief introduction to sign language, see Malmkjaer (1991); Liddell (2003).

2 The aim of this sign language course was described by one of the club leaders: “To create an opposite integration where hearing youth learn basic sign language, in addition to some facts about deaf people’s culture, history and identity. This because they (the hearing) may be a natural part of deaf people's milieu. At the same time this may contribute to a larger network of friends and acquaintances for deaf youth in the city.“ He described the project in the following terms: “Youth clubs in this municipality have on several occasions tried to integrate deaf or hard-of-hearing youth in the club without success. At the same time, most deaf youths are integrated in normal schools. Deaf people have to adjust to mainstream society in most arenas. Through our specific sign language club, they now have a safe arena where they can be on their own premises and communicate in sign language. Several youngsters who meet the deaf at school, in the club or at other arenas have expressed the wish to learn sign language, in order to communicate with the deaf” (our translation).

3 “It’s the hearing who now have to be integrated”.

4 Light is the absolute precondition for human vision, looking or gaze.

5 In this school ten teachers, including the teachers’ adviser, initiated a similar sign language course.

6 Audio Video Interleave (also Audio Video Interleaved, acronym AVI) is a multimedia container format made by Microsoft as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback. AVI files support multiple streaming audio and video, like the DVD video format technologies, visual anthropological and sign language interdisciplinary methodologies. Again, this confirms the complexity of studying human communication and interaction. Looking for our main aim of understanding more of human communication complexities, our common findings acknowledge the phonocentricity of the social and human sciences. Once you remove the sense of hearing, the power of the visual comes to the fore.

7 Curiously enough, in the early days of Hollywood's patriarchal film industry, the job of editing film was regularly given to women in the mistaken belief that it was just like stitching. (Editor's note)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rolf Piene Halvorsen

Rolf PIENE HALVORSEN is a senior adviser at the National Centre of Hearing Impairment and Mental Health, Oslo University Hospital, and associate professor in the Department of Language and Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. He also worked for many years as a minister with the deaf and as sign language interpreter. He has been translating literature and liturgy into Norwegian Sign Language. E-mail: [email protected]

Aase Lyngvaer Hansen

AASE LYNGVAER HANSEN is associate professor (emerita) of Language and Communication at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her multidisciplinary research focuses on interaction and learning in visually oriented classrooms. She has also worked for many years as a teacher of the deaf and as a developer of teaching material for the deaf on video, DVD and the internet. E-mail: [email protected]

Ida Hydle

IDA HYDLE is adjunct professor at the University of Tromsø, the Arctic University of Norway, Department of Child Welfare and Social Work, and is also connected to NOVA, Oslo Metropolitan University. She holds PhD degrees in medicine and in social anthropology. She has worked for many years with research, teaching and training at academic levels in social medicine, mental health work, medical and legal anthropology, visual cultural studies and peace studies, restorative justice and restorative practice studies. E-mail: [email protected]