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.