A Performative Ethnography Showing Deaf Children’s Schooling in the Republic of Ireland

What is it about?

The ways in which we approach children and childhood as variables of social analysis has undergone profound change in the last quarter century in the Republic of Ireland. This performative ethnography inquires into the secret lore and language of deaf children’s lives in one residential school. Out of sight of the community of the other, children willfully embodied a transgressive, liberatory, and decolonizing sign language of their own. Medium and message come together in this performative ethnography through a clutch of theatrical devices associated with the “epic theater” of the German playwright and theater director, Bertolt Brecht, including loosely connected scenes, storyline turns, political placards, and addresses to audience. Techniques associated with “found poetry,” or the literary equivalent of collage, are combined with pentimenti or a painting within a painting to fuse image and word and bring forward a critical and political aesthetics of deaf children and deaf schooling and new media for encouraging alternative social imaginaries and possible actions.

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