Múltiplos letramentos de pessoas com deficiência visual: uma pesquisa discursiva de caráter etnográfico

Abstract

This thesis investigates the discourses, literacies and identities of people with visual impairments (DV)’s through a discursive, critic, ethnographic research. The theoretical background for this study is derived from the relations between the Social Discourse Theory - Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) and Fairclogh (2001, 2003, 2010, 2012), the Social Literacy Theory - Barton and Hamilton (1998), Rios (2009), and Street (1984), and the Social Model of Disability - Diniz (2012), and Martins (2006). The main research question was: How do visually impaired people understand their literacies and what positions do they take up about them and how are their literacies configured in the practices in which they are involved? An ethnographic methodology was adopted, resulting in a written corpus consisting of 42 field diaries, 22 interview transcripts and 31 participant diaries. Ten blind people participated in the construction of the corpus. The data were then analysed, and it was concluded that the scope of the literacies of the people investigated is not limited to interaction with the computer or the Braille system; in addition to that, the existence of other means, modes and body activities that are part of the interactions among the visually impaired and the reading and writing artefacts was observed. In these interactions, the presence of what is called in this thesis of dominant body-discursive centralities was also observed, which have been keeping the social practices of blind people under covert colonization. These results allow us to conclude that, within the reality of multiple literacies in which the participants are inserted, the body-discursive dominant centralities manifest themselves through a vision-centric order of discourse in the representations by visually impaired people of the literacies in which they are involved. Based on this conclusion, we propose a transdisciplinary dialogue between the metaphor of ecology of literacies by Barton (1994) and the ecology of recognition present in the sociology of absences by Santos (2002) as an opposition that can lead to the emergence of the literacies still silenced and/or deleted from the visually impaired people in their multiple social practices.