Narrativas do eu: construção identitária de atores sociais surdos sob as lentes da abordagem sociológica e comunicacional do discurso

Abstract

The deaf community, throughout their history, as a linguistic minority, has faced the denial of rights, and the struggle for the recognition of these rights has become a hallmark of the deaf community. Therefore, the aim of this research is to reflect on the struggles for recognition of deaf social actors, as identified in their self-narratives, within the broader context of their educational life, as influential aspects of identity (re)constructions, and in the establishment of effective sociocultural changes for this linguistic minority. To comprehend the identity achievements of the deaf community throughout their life trajectories, we draw on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which focuses on studying social problematizations and fostering the denunciation of power relations that establish inequalities for vulnerable groups (Van Dijk, 2008), with a focus on the Sociological and Communicational Approach to Discourse (SCAD), which centers its studies on social and cultural changes as contributions to epistemologies of the South of the South (Pedrosa, 2012, 2016, 2024). Embracing the transdisciplinary nature of CDA (Fairclough, 2012), we engage with Deaf Studies (Perlin, 2016) and the theory of the Struggle for Recognition (Honneth, 2009). The corpus is comprised of the “self-narratives” of deaf students from the Libras Language graduation at the Federal University of Sergipe from the classes of 2020 to 2022. As this is a socially oriented research, grounded in CDA with analyses bridging linguistic, political, and social dimensions (Pedrosa, 2018), we examine the corpus through the lens of qualitative- interpretative methodology (Magalhães; Martins; Resende, 2017; Nunes, 2021) and ethnosociology (Bertaux, 2010), following the methodological path suggested in SCAD Pedrosa, 2016, 2018; Cunha, 2021). To address linguistic analyses, we employ Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), whose perspective centers on the social context of language use (Fuzer; Cabral, 2014). Through the results, we were able to observe, through the self-narratives of deaf social actors, that their positions in the struggle for the recognition of denied rights led to social and personal changes, influencing their (re)constructions of identity.