During my stay at York University the emerging idea of my forthcoming project took more concrete shape. Now I can quite confidently state that the main core of my project is the usage of the technology by the deaf communities in Poland.
There are several tricky issues regarding this topic, that I will consider in the following posts. The first one is the group of the deaf itself. It is a very diverse community. The deaf, are not the same as the Deaf, hard of hearing or people that lost their hearing as adults. In fact all these groups are different and separate to the great extend. It seems that the crucial feature here is the disability. While deafness is very often considered as illness, as a kind of lack the group of Deaf, perceiving themselves as language minority, they won't see their bodies as damaged or disabled because of deafness.
It is very hard to find a common ground for researching and analysing the deaf considering this great difference in self-perception and identity creation. It will be - as I suppose - hard to investigate the technology usage within such a heterogeneous group of people. For sure the Internet usage will be the crucial ground for investigation here (including the usage of social media, vlogging, forums) but also the technologies such as hearing aids or implants will be taken into consideration.
So far I have started the participant observation on one of the most dynamic online deaf community, which is the deaf.pl.
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