In this talk we consider what it means to be a deaf hearer, and how a re-imagined “deaf audiology” might be required to assess deaf sensory experiences with cochlear implants. Mills, a historian, and Friedner, an anthropologist, draw from their research on and with deaf hearers to examine taken-for-granted facts about natural and artificial hearing, as developed alongside technologies such as electronic audiometry and cochlear implants. We also analyze how hearing is socially, politically, and economically produced through active labor on the part of engineers (who may or may not know anything about deafness and deaf people), families of deaf people, and deaf people themselves. Specifically, Mills will draw from archival work and interviews to look back at the formulation of cochlear implants as “artificial hearing” in early experiments with multichannel, vocoder-based devices at Stanford in the 1970s.
Friedner’s part of the talk will then travel to India and Pakistan to ethnographically look at how cochlear implants as the current gold standard in intervention on hearing loss actually plays out in developing contexts. What happens when cochlear implants travel? We will end with a brief discussion of the importance of interrogating how we analyze hearing as well as what are considered good outcomes with hearing technologies, drawing from our work with an interdisciplinary team of deaf and hearing researchers on a Canadian Institute of Health Research grant led by anthropologist Stephanie Lloyd. With a million implants in use (and counting) worldwide, our goal in this talk is to look at hearing as a value-laden practice, and to open up possibilities for participants in the MoH conference to re-evaluate alternative forms of hearing.
Panel Discussion
- Prof. Michele Friedner, Chair, Department of Comparative Human Development, The University of Chicago
- Prof. Michael McKee, MD, Department of Family Medicine, The University of Michigan
- Prof. Mara Mills, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University
- Prof. Emily Stucken, MD, Department of Otolaryngology, The University of Michigan
