Doing a short-term ethnography about deaf young people’s literacies

Requirements of research done in brief terms might come into conflict with proper understanding of our phenomena. In particular, ethnography comes from a research tradition in which long times of observation are expected and in which the phenomenon of interest itself is developed through involvement in fieldwork. The methodological approach of short-term ethnography emerges as a useful way of navigating this conflict.

This presentation will revolve around the principles of short-term ethnography: the intensity of observations, focus on detail, ethnographic-theoretical dialog, and picking up traces of encounters. They will be grounded in my own research topic, the literacies of deaf young people. By understanding literacies in their broader sense as meaning-making practices, and literacies of deaf people as involving different modes and modalities, literacies become something that can be observed intensively in deaf people’s everyday lives. Preliminary results will be shown to give concrete examples of multimodal literacies.

The presentation will explore the futures of ethnographic research in terms of the opportunities brought up by an ethnographic approach done in briefer amounts of time. But I will also explore the tensions I found in my own practice in terms of: the requirement of a sharp definition of the phenomenon of study; the importance of socialisation processes previous to fieldwork; the availability of various previous experiences to make contrasts; the selection of a phenomenon that can be observed very often. It will be stressed that short-term ethnography does not replace other longer-term ethnographic practices but comes handy for specific research purposes.