Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures in India

Description

Revealing inequalities and sensory hierarchies embedded in the latest medical technologies and global biotechnical markets What happens when cochlear implants, heralded as the first successful bionic technologies, make their way around the globe and are provided by both states and growing private markets? As Sensory Futures follows these implants from development to domestication and their unequal distribution in India, Michele Ilana Friedner explores biotechnical intervention in the realm of disability and its implications for state politics in the Global South.  A signing and speaking deaf bilateral cochlear implant user, Friedner weaves personal reflections into this fine-grained ethnography of everyday negotiations, activist aspirations, and the space of the family. She places sensory anthropology in conversation with disability studies to analyze how normative sensoria are cultivated and the pursuit of listening and speaking capability is enacted. She argues that the conditions of potentiality that have emerged through cochlear implantation have, in fact, resulted in ever narrower understandings of future life possibilities. Rejecting sensory hierarchies that privilege audition, Friedner calls for multisensory, multimodal, and multipersonal ways of relating to the world.  Sensory Futures explores deaf people’s desires to create habitable worlds and grapple with what their futures might look like, in India and beyond, amid a surge in both biotechnical interventions and disability rights activism. With implications for a broad range of disability experiences, this sensitive, in-depth research focuses on the specific experiences of deaf people, both children and adults, and the structural, political, and social possibilities offered by both biotechnological and social “cures.” Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Note on Transliteration and Anonymization Introduction. Sensory, Modal, and Relational Narrowing through Cochlear Implants Chapter 1. Disability Camps and Surgical Celebrations: Indian Disability Interventions and the Creation of Complex Dependencies Chapter 2. Becoming Unisensory: Creating a Child’s Social Sense through Auditory Verbal Therapy and Total Communication Chapter 3. Mothers’  Work: Intersensing and Learning to Talk like a Cricket Commentator Chapter 4. (Non-)Use: Maintaining Devices, Relationships, and Senses Chapter 5. Becoming Normal: Potentiality beyond Passing Conclusion. Beyond the Bad S: Making Space for Sensory Unruliness Acknowledgments Appendix: Five Indian Cochlear Implant Trajectories Notes Bibliography Index About the Author