“Should all deaf children learn sign language?” This seemingly innocuous question was the theme of a roundtable article published in the influential journal Pediatrics in 2015, which compiled responses from a range of stakeholders, including otolaryngologists, linguists, educators, and parents of deaf children. Understandably, this broad diversity also delivered a range of responses: while educator Nancy Mellon and surgeon John …
Tag Archives: deaf culture
Neurological, Structural, and Pandemic Emergencies: Elective Cochlear Implant Surgery during the COVID-19 Pandemic
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
While conducting research in India during the summer of 2019 for my book on cochlear implantation, I kept on coming across an interesting object: a small cardboard office supply holder shaped like a yellow and black ambulance on which it is written on the side, top, and back in block capital letters: “HEARING LOSS IS AN EMERGENCY” and “ACT NOW” …
On Responsibility (and Laziness)
This article is part of the series: Disability from the South: Toward a Lexicon
I am a cultural anthropologist who conducts research with deaf children and their families in Mexico City. Echarle ganas is a Mexican colloquial expression that roughly translates to “you have to give it your all.” “Échale ganas!” or “work at it!” is often heard as a rallying cry when things are not going as desired. This saying is …
Disability as Diversity: A New Biopolitics
This article is part of the series: Inhabitable Worlds
We’re a medical anthropologist and a literary critic, and while our research interests seemingly have little overlap, we found ourselves engaged in a series of conversations about how the language of diversity shapes representations of disability and reproductive politics, and how this representation stems from the biopolitical management of life in the twenty-first century. In the short essay that follows, …
Michele Friedner’s “Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India”
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India
Rutgers University Press, 2015, 216 pages
An Indian coffee shop franchise advertises their practice of hiring deaf baristas – “silent brewmasters” – to work their espresso machines. A Bangalore tech company boasts that it hires “physically challenged” workers only (118-121). Meanwhile, deaf adults in Bangalore complain that adult education at …