Literacies and discourses among visually impaired people in a city in the North East of Brazil

2017 Research in Progress (RIPS) seminar series

Speaker: Dr Beatriz Furtado Alencar Lima 

In this talk Beatrice will present a study that she carried out during 2011 to 2015 in Fortaleza in the North East of Brazil. The focus was on the literacy practices and forms of multimodal communication employed by ten visually impaired participants (mostly teachers and students). The research lay at the interface between socio-/applied linguistics and a social theory of disability. She will begin with a brief review of the orienting theories for the study and then go on to describe the design and conduct of the research. After this she will present selected findings and show how she undertook the data analysis and how this led to theory building around concepts such as ‘vision-centred order of discourse’. In the analysed data, she will identify what she means by ‘vision-centred order of discourse’ and what are the implications of this for visually impaired people.

Biography  

Dr. Beatriz Furtado Alencar Lima is a Lecturer in the Foreign Languages Department at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), in Fortaleza, North East of Brazil. She has a Doctorate in Linguistics from UFC. Her areas of research interest are: Literacy Studies, Inclusive Education, Critical Discourse Analysis. Her doctoral research focused on the literacy practices and the multimodal communication of visual impaired people. She is now planning to develop research in two areas: (1) the investigation of forms of learning support for students of foreign languages who are visually impaired; (2) close study of the specific nature of multimodal communication among learners with different disabilities. 

The event is free and all are welcome. You do not need to register for this event.