My ethnographic story: deaf people in India learning English
Uta Papen
Linguistic ethnography seems to be sandwiched (and perhaps squashed?) between disciplines influenced by different and possibly opposing conceptions of knowledge and method. The type of ethnography I am trying to produce does not fit easily with the expectations of linguistics journals where specific notions of what counts as ‘data’ and ‘evidence’ reign and where ‘rigour’ is asked for. The lived, the experienced, the transient, and affective in understanding others and their practices is excluded or couched in doubt, while the researcher only appears in their role as rational scholar. My ethnographic story is trying to capture some of these missing parts.
I am also trying, in my work, to put forward an understanding of literacy not as cognitive skill, performed and measured, but as something people do and experience. Literacy, in this view, is also affective and embodied and intense feelings can be associated with it (Ehret 2018). In my classroom observations, these embodied and affective aspects were visible to me in the highly animated gestures and faces of the students signing and the frequent movements from their seats to the board or to the other side of the room, to join in with a discussion going on at that end.
My own work is influenced by social anthropology. Some of my early readings have stayed with me for decades, for example Laura Bohannan’s Return to Laughter, an anthropological novel about fieldwork amongst the Tiv in Nigeria, published in 1964, under the pseudonym Eleanore Smith Bowen. Bohannan used a pseudonym because writing about fieldwork was highly unusual, the personal and autobiographical commonly eclipsed from anthropological writing. Nowadays, things may have changed within anthropology, but less so in other disciplines. My own experience is that too often I try to squeeze my work into formats of journal articles where research is seen as a mostly linear process, with the author as data analyst, and where findings about literacy learning have to take the form of ‘skills gains’ and improved ‘test scores’. Alternative spaces lie outside traditional academic publications, for example in open access publishing and the use of photography and film.
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Biography
Originally trained as a social anthropologist, with my PhD (2002) I began my journey from anthropology towards education and specifically literacy research. But I have never completely left anthropology and throughout my now (quite a few) years as an academic in the Literacy Research Centre and Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, I have remained committed to ethnography and have continued to enjoy and value fieldwork and long(er) term participant observation. A core aim of my work is to critically examine the teaching and learning of literacy, specifically in primary schools, and in relation to a method called ‘phonics’. My most recent work is with deaf people, primarily in India, where I am involved in research seeking to develop new ways of teaching English literacy to deaf children and young adults. More information and a list of publications can be found here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about/people/uta-papen
Writing Language Ethnographically