In this talk, I draw on ethnographic research in India on state and private funded cochlear implant programs to look at how the sense of audition is actually produced through political economic and relational practices. Sensory scholars have long argued that the senses are socially and culturally produced; I build on this work to look at how the emergence and normalization of technologies such as cochlear implants introduce new sensory hierarchies and inequalities. Neuroscientists have argued that deaf and hard of hearing children, and people in general, work through “degraded signals” in their attempts to hear and that they engage in significant cognitive labor to interpret sound because of this labor. I am on one hand reluctant to embrace the concept of “degraded signals” because this is deficit framing. On the other hand, there are high stakes here: why are Indian children provided with implant processors that are obsolete elsewhere and that provide them with less-than-optimal hearing? What kinds of sensory infrastructures are established and maintained in which deaf children inhabit the world through listening and speaking but work with degraded machines? I look at the "signal labor" and "sensory labor" in which deaf children and their families engage to argue for the importance of looking at sense as facilitated and distributed as well as produced by the state and multinational corporations

 

VIA ZOOM: https://bristol-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/8907450421?pwd=blhxY2VCOXk1Tmg2VDl0dlo3dm4rdz09

Meeting ID: 890 745 0421
Passcode: 954489