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  • ‘The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper’ (WB Yeats): enhancing resilience among deaf young people in South Africa through photography and filmmaking

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Original research
‘The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper’ (WB Yeats): enhancing resilience among deaf young people in South Africa through photography and filmmaking
  1. Alys Young1,
  2. Lorenzo Ferrarini2,
  3. Andrew Irving2,
  4. Claudine Storbeck3,
  5. Robyn Swannack3,
  6. Alexandra Tomkins2,
  7. Shirley Wilson4
  1. 1 SORD (Social Research with Deaf People), School of Health Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
  2. 2 GCVA (Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology), University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
  3. 3 CDS (Centre for Deaf Studies), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
  4. 4 NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Professor Alys Young, Division of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK; alys.young{at}manchester.ac.uk

Abstract

This article concerns deaf children and young people living in South Africa who are South African Sign Language users and who participated in an interdisciplinary research project using the medium of teaching film and photography with the goal of enhancing resilience. Specifically, this paper explores three questions that emerged from the deaf young people’s experience and involvement with the project: (i) What is disclosed about deaf young people’s worldmaking through the filmic and photographic modality? (ii) What specific impacts do deaf young people’s ontologically visual habitations of the world have on the production of their film/photographic works? (iii) How does deaf young people’s visual, embodied praxis through film and photography enable resilience? The presentation of findings and related theoretical discussion is organised around three key themes: (i) ‘writing’ into reality through photographic practice, (ii) filmmaking as embodied emotional praxis and (iii) enhancing resilience through visual methodologies. The discussion is interspersed with examples of the young people’s own work.

  • social anthropology
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2019-011661

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    Footnotes

    • Twitter @lorenzferrarini

    • Collaborators Bianca Birdsey; Deborah Clelland; Katherine Rogers; Nenio Mbazima and Sibusiso Mangele.

    • Contributors AY was the originator of this article and lead writer and read and approved the final manuscript. LF, AI, CS and AT provided supplementary written material and read and approved the final manuscript. RS and SW provided additional edits to the final draft and read and approved the final manuscript. All authors carried out the fieldwork referred to in the content of the article. BB, DC, NM and SM contributed to the fieldwork on which this article draws and KR was an original co-applicant on the grant that supports this work.

    • Funding This work was produced as a result of an AHRC/MRC grant Ref: AH/R00580X/1 through the Global Challenges Research Fund.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Parental/guardian consent obtained.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data availability statement Data are available upon reasonable request.