The other among my people: family relationships, cell phone uses and emerging deaf culture

The relationship between hearing family and deaf young people in a communication context is also an educational process, increasingly mediated by technique in contemporary times, which poses concrete challenges for all involved in the issue of the emergence of deaf culture. The objective of this research - still in process - is to understand the communicative dynamics between the deaf and their relatives as a field of uncertainties between cultures (deaf and listener), crossed by the changes in the media, specifically the cell phone and its uses. From semi-structured interviews and coexistence in an educational environment, we seek to answer two questions: a) how communication between deaf young people and their families develops?; b) how does the cell phone open up possibilities and impose challenges to deaf-listener and deaf-deaf in the family context? The conclusions reached until the present moment were: 1. there is an oralizing tendency on the part of the family and an ambivalent posture and questioning from the deaf position; 2. there are concrete mediations emerging in the communicative dynamic with high creative potential that opens up a non-hierarchical field between the listener and deaf cultures; 3. the cell phone is an active mediator, not a simple transparent technique among those involved in the communication, changing the modes of expression with educational potential still little explored.