BARNS RÄTT TILLTECKENSPRÅKIG UTBILDNING : En WPR-studie av hur döva och hörselskadade barns rätt till teckenspråk representeras i statlig granskning

Sammanfattning

The bachelor thesis examines how Deaf and hard of hearing children´s right to education in sign language is represented within the Swedish government oversight. The aim is to examine how this right is problematized in the Swedish National Audit Office´s review of education authorities’ work with children´s rights, and to analyse the effects this problem representation has on the comprehension of sign language as a civil right. The study addresses two research questions: how is the problem of children´s right to sign language represented in the review, and what discursive, subjectification, and lived effects does this representation produce? The study is based on a qualitative discourse analysis of a review conducted by the Swedish National Audit Office. Carol Bacchi´s “What´s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach constitutes the main analytical framework, complemented by the theory of deaf people’s “dual category status”. The conclusions show that sign language is absent as an explicit object of problematization, a finding that constitutes a result in itself. Instead, children´s rights to sign language are framed through a disability-oriented problem representation, in which the minority language dimension is marginalised and sign language is represented as an individually assessed support measure.