M Friedner
Biographic Data
| ID | 5697 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Friedner |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Friedner |
| SIGNATURE | FRIEDNER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0606-9610 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 122 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Beyond the Camp and the Surgery: Cochlear Implants and Complex Dependencies in India
The Indian state relates to the category of disability—and materialises itself—through the distribution, often at camps, of aids and appliances such as hearing aids, canes and wheelchairs that are ‘make in India’, as examples. In 2014, the state modernised its distribution programme and started providing cochlear implants to children living below the poverty line. While aspirations exist to create and manufacture an Indian-made cochlear implant, …
From Obsolescence to Abandonment: Exploring the Precarious Use of Cochlear Implants in India
Cochlear implants are considered the gold standard in intervening on deafness and hearing loss. However, "success" is predicated upon routine and consistent use, which in turn is predicated on the ability to maintain devices. This essay considers what happens when use is partial and precarious and asks what happens when external implant processors become obsolete. Contributing to Science and Technology Studies scholarship on obsolescence and the …
Case conference and para case conference: Asking different questions about disability and structural ableism
What might it mean to change the questions we ask during clinical case conferences and to ask different kinds of questions, both in case conferences and more broadly in our clinics, care conferences and research? How might conducting 'para case conferences' with diverse stakeholders, community members and scholars invigorate conversation and surface different kinds of concerns? By 'para,' I draw from all of the meanings of the prefix, including a…
Coming to terms: Gaza and disability
In this piece, we bear witness to the photos, reels, and videos produced by Palestinians documenting-and trying to survive-genocide in Gaza. Drawing primarily on archives that we have built through engaging with interlocutors, colleagues, and social media platforms, we focus on the realities faced by disabled Gazans and their kin, who urge international disability movement counterparts and disabled communities to support a ceasefire and the broad…
Becoming malleable: How orienting to disability, communication, and the senses further commits anthropology to its moral project
Drawing on anthropological scholarship on the senses, embodiment, and communication, we argue for a capacity-based anthropology that takes account of human variation in all domains of everyday life, including "the field" and "the anthropology seminar." Such an approach allows us to consider the ways that humans are differently malleable, and we stress that enacting malleability, when possible, is a kind of ethical engagement. Attending to malleab…
Discerning personhood through lena-dena: Disability professionals, ethics, and communication
This article looks at practices of discernment in disability spaces in India by analyzing (hierarchical) relational contexts in which disability professionals and disabled people in India interact. We argue that discernment, which we explore through lena-dena (giving and taking), allows us to analyze the ethical stakes of processes of communication, interpreting, and facilitation. Vaidya analyzes how special educators make broad discernments abou…
Recuperating the bad outcome: Reimagining optimal futures beyond Auditory Verbal Therapy and Applied Behavioral Analysis
This article analyzes convergences in the ways that both deafness and autism are framed as crises that require immediate (and often expensive) professional intervention. Parents receive messages that failure to therapeutically intervene will prevent their children from living normative lives. We demonstrate how therapy techniques such as Auditory Verbal Therapy and Applied Behavioral Analysis have proliferated to address these crises. We explore …
Entangled Interdependence: Sign Language Interpreting without Recognition in India and Vietnam
Disabled people have achieved more legal recognition from nation-states and societies because of advocacy and institutional efforts such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This is a starting, not an end, point: How does legal recognition trickle down (or not) or become distributed to those who work with disabled people? This article examines this question by ethnographically attending to the experiences o…
Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies
Both sound studies and Deaf studies depend on something of a divide between hearing and seeing. So, while music historian Bruce Johnson makes a critical point when he writes that, "an auditory rather than a predominantly visual approach to the past produces a different cultural history", such a phrasing risks posing the visual and auditory as at odds with one another. In both sound and Deaf studies, a clean division is also often assumed between …
Deaf Anthropology
Deaf anthropology is a field that exists in conversation with but is not reducible to the interdisciplinary field of deaf studies. Deaf anthropology is predicated upon a commitment to understanding deafnesses across time and space while holding on to "deaf" as a category that does something socially, politically, morally, and methodologically. In doing so, deaf anthropology moves beyond compartmentalizing the body, the senses, and disciplinary bo…
Disability, Anonymous Love, and Interworldly Socials in Urban India
This essay considers disability studies scholars' investment in "the social" as a site of rehabilitation, recuperation, and cure in order to argue that in urban India, the case is otherwise: the public often engages with disability through "anonymous love," which produces opportunities for the concretization of disability as a category, for disabled people to exist socially, and for validation of an existing social. I argue, however, that this co…
Praying for Rights: Cultivating Deaf Worldings in Urban India
This article ethnographically analyzes the emergence of deaf worlding in New Delhi, India centered around Christianity, deaf rights, and deaf sociality. Approaching disability through human rights frameworks involves the worlding of rights-focused subjectivities. However, disability as a social and moral category and experience is frequently routed through and exists alongside other domains in which rights may be of differential importance. Thus …
Beyond the Social
Through engaging with this collection of articles devoted to cognitive disability, I offer concluding remarks concerned specifically with the heuristic and experiential value of the concept of ‘the social’. I argue that an exploration of cognitive disability opens up a space for anthropologists to consider their own language and semiotic ideologies and to consider how to attend to and produce knowledge with non-linguistic subjects. Beyond this, h…
Cross-Disability' in India: On the limits of Disability as a Category and the Work of Negotiating Impairments
This essay analyzes the stakes involved when a movement claims to be “cross-disability” in India. Activists, disabled peoples’ organizations, and non-governmental organizations devoted to disability often claim that their work and focus is “cross-disability” and that all categories of disability are included within their purview. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with various disability organizations and disabled people in India between…
Vessel of God/Access to God: American Sign Language Interpreting in American Evangelical Churches
According to professional understandings, American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters provide language and communication access. This article draws on ethnographic research and interviews with ASL interpreters in the United States to analyze the category of "faith-based" interpreting in relation to "professional" or "secular" interpreting. Through such a comparison, and through attention to the ethical, linguistic, and communicative practices of fa…
Sign Language as Virus: Stigma and Relationality in Urban India
Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in urban locations in India, I consider the relationship between stigma and contagion in the context of deaf peoples' desires for and practices of communication in Indian Sign Language. If sign language can be considered or represented as a virus-and if it spreads between and among deaf people upon exposure-what might cure differentially look like, in a time when cochlear implantation and oral-based ea…
How the disabled body unites the national body: Disability as ‘feel good’ diversity in urban India
This article analyzes both representations of disability in popular media and the role of disabled workers in urban India and demonstrates how the category of disability becomes a form of non-threatening ‘feel good’ diversity. Unlike other axes of difference such as class, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion, India’s disability rights movement, corporations, and mainstream media represent disability as largely apolitical. Drawing on Nehruvian …
Deaf studies meets autistic studies
What might deaf studies and autistic studies have in common? Why, in many cases, is deafness considered to be a norm to be analyzed through linguistic and cultural frameworks, while autism is (still) seen as pathological? Utilizing ethnographic research, participation in two conferences on autism and sign language, and an analysis of deaf peoples' and autistic peoples' self-(re)presentation, we attend to sensory solidarities that might exist betw…
Leprosy and a life in South India: Journeys with a Tamil Brahmin
Leprosy and a life in South India: journeys with a Tamil Brahmin." Contemporary South Asia, 24(4), pp. 470–471
Understanding Sign Language Bibles through Affective Audits in South India
This article analyses the role that the emic category of understanding plays in creating new forms of personhood and new worlds for sign language using deaf people in south India. As an ethnographic study of the production, dissemination, and circulation of Indian Sign Language Bible DVDs by an international non-denominational Christian missionary organization, this article analyses how the power of sign language as heart language lies in the pot…
Deaf uplines and downlines: Multi-level marketing and disharmonious sociality in urban India
This article analyses how the structure of multi-level marketing, through the production of the categories of uplines and downlines, fractures deaf sociality in urban India. Hierarchies have always existed as part of a deaf moral economy in which deaf people share news and information, teach each other sign language and help each other to develop. However, the intermingling of moral and financial economies as a result of post-liberalisation polit…
New Disability Mobilities and Accessibilities in Urban India
This article analyzes mobilities and accessibilities in urban India in relation to disability in India. The concept of disability has become a privileged site for the state and NGOs to situate development interventions and for corporations to engage in corporate social responsibility initiatives. These state, NGO, and corporate efforts are directed at a specific kind of disabled individual and are heavily based upon market logics. Utilizing data …
Deaf bodies and corporate bodies: New regimes of value in Bangalore's business process outsourcing sector
This article ethnographically analyses how groups (and not just individuals) are produced in business process outsourcing (BPO) workplaces. In order to mitigate an unstable labour pool, corporations hire deaf workers to perform identical BPO work regardless of their qualifications and backgrounds. These hiring practices serve to cement existing relationships and produce deaf workers as a group marked only by deafness. This article explores how en…
Deaf Capital: An Exploration of the Relationship between Stigma and Value in Deaf Multilevel Marketing Participation in Urban India
This article ethnographically examines how some deaf people in urban India have begun to orient themselves toward the future by participating in multilevel marketing businesses. In the absence of other structural possibilities for deaf future-making, deaf Indians have turned to such businesses in search of social, economic, and moral livelihood. This article analyzes participation in one particular business and asks how participating within the b…
The Church of Deaf Sociality: Deaf Churchgoing Practices and "Sign Bread and Butter" in Bangalore, India
This article ethnographically analyzes the practices of deaf young adults in Bangalore, India. As sign language is not used by families, schools, or other institutions, the church is a crucial educational space. Churchgoing provides deaf young adults with opportunities to orient themselves toward other deaf young adults, to develop new ideas of self and other, and to value sign language
Deaf Anthropology
Deaf anthropology is a field that exists in conversation with but is not reducible to the interdisciplinary field of deaf studies. Deaf anthropology is predicated upon a commitment to understanding deafnesses across time and space while holding on to "deaf" as a category that does something socially, politically, morally, and methodologically. In doing so, deaf anthropology moves beyond compartmentalizing the body, the senses, and disciplinary bo…
How the disabled body unites the national body: Disability as ‘feel good’ diversity in urban India
This article analyzes both representations of disability in popular media and the role of disabled workers in urban India and demonstrates how the category of disability becomes a form of non-threatening ‘feel good’ diversity. Unlike other axes of difference such as class, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion, India’s disability rights movement, corporations, and mainstream media represent disability as largely apolitical. Drawing on Nehruvian …
Sign Language as Virus: Stigma and Relationality in Urban India
Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in urban locations in India, I consider the relationship between stigma and contagion in the context of deaf peoples' desires for and practices of communication in Indian Sign Language. If sign language can be considered or represented as a virus-and if it spreads between and among deaf people upon exposure-what might cure differentially look like, in a time when cochlear implantation and oral-based ea…
Disability, Anonymous Love, and Interworldly Socials in Urban India
This essay considers disability studies scholars' investment in "the social" as a site of rehabilitation, recuperation, and cure in order to argue that in urban India, the case is otherwise: the public often engages with disability through "anonymous love," which produces opportunities for the concretization of disability as a category, for disabled people to exist socially, and for validation of an existing social. I argue, however, that this co…
Deaf studies meets autistic studies
What might deaf studies and autistic studies have in common? Why, in many cases, is deafness considered to be a norm to be analyzed through linguistic and cultural frameworks, while autism is (still) seen as pathological? Utilizing ethnographic research, participation in two conferences on autism and sign language, and an analysis of deaf peoples' and autistic peoples' self-(re)presentation, we attend to sensory solidarities that might exist betw…
Audit Bodies: Embodied Participation, Disability Universalism, and Accessibility in India
In this article we think critically about the role of the “access audit” in creating new forms of embodied participation, experiential and technical expertise, and imaginaries of what the modern Indian city should be . We analyze how disability activists make claims about the relationship between subjective bodily experiences and bodies of objective knowledge. We also explore the emergence of a professional access audit apparatus focused on techn…
Vessel of God/Access to God: American Sign Language Interpreting in American Evangelical Churches
According to professional understandings, American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters provide language and communication access. This article draws on ethnographic research and interviews with ASL interpreters in the United States to analyze the category of "faith-based" interpreting in relation to "professional" or "secular" interpreting. Through such a comparison, and through attention to the ethical, linguistic, and communicative practices of fa…
Deaf bodies and corporate bodies: New regimes of value in Bangalore's business process outsourcing sector
This article ethnographically analyses how groups (and not just individuals) are produced in business process outsourcing (BPO) workplaces. In order to mitigate an unstable labour pool, corporations hire deaf workers to perform identical BPO work regardless of their qualifications and backgrounds. These hiring practices serve to cement existing relationships and produce deaf workers as a group marked only by deafness. This article explores how en…
New Disability Mobilities and Accessibilities in Urban India
This article analyzes mobilities and accessibilities in urban India in relation to disability in India. The concept of disability has become a privileged site for the state and NGOs to situate development interventions and for corporations to engage in corporate social responsibility initiatives. These state, NGO, and corporate efforts are directed at a specific kind of disabled individual and are heavily based upon market logics. Utilizing data …
Deaf Capital: An Exploration of the Relationship between Stigma and Value in Deaf Multilevel Marketing Participation in Urban India
This article ethnographically examines how some deaf people in urban India have begun to orient themselves toward the future by participating in multilevel marketing businesses. In the absence of other structural possibilities for deaf future-making, deaf Indians have turned to such businesses in search of social, economic, and moral livelihood. This article analyzes participation in one particular business and asks how participating within the b…
"Producing "Silent Brewmasters: Deaf Workers and Added Value in India's Coffee Cafés
This article ethnographically explores how and why deaf workers are hired in new Indian coffee shop chains. Arguing that such workers produce added value for the corporations that hire them, hearing coworkers, and customers who frequent these outlets, this article also explores the ambivalence that deaf workers feel about such employment "opportunities." As a result of the decline in public-sector employment, the private sector has become a new s…
Becoming malleable: How orienting to disability, communication, and the senses further commits anthropology to its moral project
Drawing on anthropological scholarship on the senses, embodiment, and communication, we argue for a capacity-based anthropology that takes account of human variation in all domains of everyday life, including "the field" and "the anthropology seminar." Such an approach allows us to consider the ways that humans are differently malleable, and we stress that enacting malleability, when possible, is a kind of ethical engagement. Attending to malleab…
Beyond the Social
Through engaging with this collection of articles devoted to cognitive disability, I offer concluding remarks concerned specifically with the heuristic and experiential value of the concept of ‘the social’. I argue that an exploration of cognitive disability opens up a space for anthropologists to consider their own language and semiotic ideologies and to consider how to attend to and produce knowledge with non-linguistic subjects. Beyond this, h…
Discerning personhood through lena-dena: Disability professionals, ethics, and communication
This article looks at practices of discernment in disability spaces in India by analyzing (hierarchical) relational contexts in which disability professionals and disabled people in India interact. We argue that discernment, which we explore through lena-dena (giving and taking), allows us to analyze the ethical stakes of processes of communication, interpreting, and facilitation. Vaidya analyzes how special educators make broad discernments abou…
Recuperating the bad outcome: Reimagining optimal futures beyond Auditory Verbal Therapy and Applied Behavioral Analysis
This article analyzes convergences in the ways that both deafness and autism are framed as crises that require immediate (and often expensive) professional intervention. Parents receive messages that failure to therapeutically intervene will prevent their children from living normative lives. We demonstrate how therapy techniques such as Auditory Verbal Therapy and Applied Behavioral Analysis have proliferated to address these crises. We explore …
Entangled Interdependence: Sign Language Interpreting without Recognition in India and Vietnam
Disabled people have achieved more legal recognition from nation-states and societies because of advocacy and institutional efforts such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This is a starting, not an end, point: How does legal recognition trickle down (or not) or become distributed to those who work with disabled people? This article examines this question by ethnographically attending to the experiences o…
Cross-Disability' in India: On the limits of Disability as a Category and the Work of Negotiating Impairments
This essay analyzes the stakes involved when a movement claims to be “cross-disability” in India. Activists, disabled peoples’ organizations, and non-governmental organizations devoted to disability often claim that their work and focus is “cross-disability” and that all categories of disability are included within their purview. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with various disability organizations and disabled people in India between…
The Church of Deaf Sociality: Deaf Churchgoing Practices and "Sign Bread and Butter" in Bangalore, India
This article ethnographically analyzes the practices of deaf young adults in Bangalore, India. As sign language is not used by families, schools, or other institutions, the church is a crucial educational space. Churchgoing provides deaf young adults with opportunities to orient themselves toward other deaf young adults, to develop new ideas of self and other, and to value sign language
Praying for Rights: Cultivating Deaf Worldings in Urban India
This article ethnographically analyzes the emergence of deaf worlding in New Delhi, India centered around Christianity, deaf rights, and deaf sociality. Approaching disability through human rights frameworks involves the worlding of rights-focused subjectivities. However, disability as a social and moral category and experience is frequently routed through and exists alongside other domains in which rights may be of differential importance. Thus …
Deaf uplines and downlines: Multi-level marketing and disharmonious sociality in urban India
This article analyses how the structure of multi-level marketing, through the production of the categories of uplines and downlines, fractures deaf sociality in urban India. Hierarchies have always existed as part of a deaf moral economy in which deaf people share news and information, teach each other sign language and help each other to develop. However, the intermingling of moral and financial economies as a result of post-liberalisation polit…
Identity Formation and Transnational Discourses: Thinking Beyond Identity Politics
This article is an attempt to explore the role, if any, that transnational deaf identity politics plays within the lives of members of the Delhi Foundation of Deaf Women (DFDW). Taking a two-pronged ethnographic and historical approach, I will examine how the DFDW came to exist, situating it within the field of organisations serving the deaf in Delhi, as well as providing an overview of its structure and client profile. I will also examine the te…
Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies
Sound studies and Deaf studies may seem at first impression to operate in worlds apart. We argue in this article, however, that similar renderings of hearing, deafness, and seeing as ideal types—and as often essentialized sensory modes—make it possible to read differences between Sound studies and Deaf studies as sites of possible articulation. We direct attention to four zones of productive overlap, attending to how sound is inferred in deaf and…
Audit Bodies: Embodied Participation, Disability Universalism, and Accessibility in India
In this article we think critically about the role of the “access audit” in creating new forms of embodied participation, experiential and technical expertise, and imaginaries of what the modern Indian city should be . We analyze how disability activists make claims about the relationship between subjective bodily experiences and bodies of objective knowledge. We also explore the emergence of a professional access audit apparatus focused on techn…
"Producing "Silent Brewmasters: Deaf Workers and Added Value in India's Coffee Cafés
This article ethnographically explores how and why deaf workers are hired in new Indian coffee shop chains. Arguing that such workers produce added value for the corporations that hire them, hearing coworkers, and customers who frequent these outlets, this article also explores the ambivalence that deaf workers feel about such employment "opportunities." As a result of the decline in public-sector employment, the private sector has become a new s…
Deaf Capital: An Exploration of the Relationship between Stigma and Value in Deaf Multilevel Marketing Participation in Urban India
This article ethnographically examines how some deaf people in urban India have begun to orient themselves toward the future by participating in multilevel marketing businesses. In the absence of other structural possibilities for deaf future-making, deaf Indians have turned to such businesses in search of social, economic, and moral livelihood. This article analyzes participation in one particular business and asks how participating within the b…
The Church of Deaf Sociality: Deaf Churchgoing Practices and "Sign Bread and Butter" in Bangalore, India
This article ethnographically analyzes the practices of deaf young adults in Bangalore, India. As sign language is not used by families, schools, or other institutions, the church is a crucial educational space. Churchgoing provides deaf young adults with opportunities to orient themselves toward other deaf young adults, to develop new ideas of self and other, and to value sign language
Deaf uplines and downlines: Multi-level marketing and disharmonious sociality in urban India
This article analyses how the structure of multi-level marketing, through the production of the categories of uplines and downlines, fractures deaf sociality in urban India. Hierarchies have always existed as part of a deaf moral economy in which deaf people share news and information, teach each other sign language and help each other to develop. However, the intermingling of moral and financial economies as a result of post-liberalisation polit…
New Disability Mobilities and Accessibilities in Urban India
This article analyzes mobilities and accessibilities in urban India in relation to disability in India. The concept of disability has become a privileged site for the state and NGOs to situate development interventions and for corporations to engage in corporate social responsibility initiatives. These state, NGO, and corporate efforts are directed at a specific kind of disabled individual and are heavily based upon market logics. Utilizing data …
Deaf bodies and corporate bodies: New regimes of value in Bangalore's business process outsourcing sector
This article ethnographically analyses how groups (and not just individuals) are produced in business process outsourcing (BPO) workplaces. In order to mitigate an unstable labour pool, corporations hire deaf workers to perform identical BPO work regardless of their qualifications and backgrounds. These hiring practices serve to cement existing relationships and produce deaf workers as a group marked only by deafness. This article explores how en…
Leprosy and a life in South India: Journeys with a Tamil Brahmin
Leprosy and a life in South India: journeys with a Tamil Brahmin." Contemporary South Asia, 24(4), pp. 470–471
Understanding Sign Language Bibles through Affective Audits in South India
This article analyses the role that the emic category of understanding plays in creating new forms of personhood and new worlds for sign language using deaf people in south India. As an ethnographic study of the production, dissemination, and circulation of Indian Sign Language Bible DVDs by an international non-denominational Christian missionary organization, this article analyses how the power of sign language as heart language lies in the pot…
How the disabled body unites the national body: Disability as ‘feel good’ diversity in urban India
This article analyzes both representations of disability in popular media and the role of disabled workers in urban India and demonstrates how the category of disability becomes a form of non-threatening ‘feel good’ diversity. Unlike other axes of difference such as class, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion, India’s disability rights movement, corporations, and mainstream media represent disability as largely apolitical. Drawing on Nehruvian …
Deaf studies meets autistic studies
What might deaf studies and autistic studies have in common? Why, in many cases, is deafness considered to be a norm to be analyzed through linguistic and cultural frameworks, while autism is (still) seen as pathological? Utilizing ethnographic research, participation in two conferences on autism and sign language, and an analysis of deaf peoples' and autistic peoples' self-(re)presentation, we attend to sensory solidarities that might exist betw…
Beyond the Social
Through engaging with this collection of articles devoted to cognitive disability, I offer concluding remarks concerned specifically with the heuristic and experiential value of the concept of ‘the social’. I argue that an exploration of cognitive disability opens up a space for anthropologists to consider their own language and semiotic ideologies and to consider how to attend to and produce knowledge with non-linguistic subjects. Beyond this, h…
Cross-Disability' in India: On the limits of Disability as a Category and the Work of Negotiating Impairments
This essay analyzes the stakes involved when a movement claims to be “cross-disability” in India. Activists, disabled peoples’ organizations, and non-governmental organizations devoted to disability often claim that their work and focus is “cross-disability” and that all categories of disability are included within their purview. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with various disability organizations and disabled people in India between…
Vessel of God/Access to God: American Sign Language Interpreting in American Evangelical Churches
According to professional understandings, American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters provide language and communication access. This article draws on ethnographic research and interviews with ASL interpreters in the United States to analyze the category of "faith-based" interpreting in relation to "professional" or "secular" interpreting. Through such a comparison, and through attention to the ethical, linguistic, and communicative practices of fa…
Sign Language as Virus: Stigma and Relationality in Urban India
Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in urban locations in India, I consider the relationship between stigma and contagion in the context of deaf peoples' desires for and practices of communication in Indian Sign Language. If sign language can be considered or represented as a virus-and if it spreads between and among deaf people upon exposure-what might cure differentially look like, in a time when cochlear implantation and oral-based ea…
Praying for Rights: Cultivating Deaf Worldings in Urban India
This article ethnographically analyzes the emergence of deaf worlding in New Delhi, India centered around Christianity, deaf rights, and deaf sociality. Approaching disability through human rights frameworks involves the worlding of rights-focused subjectivities. However, disability as a social and moral category and experience is frequently routed through and exists alongside other domains in which rights may be of differential importance. Thus …
Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies
Both sound studies and Deaf studies depend on something of a divide between hearing and seeing. So, while music historian Bruce Johnson makes a critical point when he writes that, "an auditory rather than a predominantly visual approach to the past produces a different cultural history", such a phrasing risks posing the visual and auditory as at odds with one another. In both sound and Deaf studies, a clean division is also often assumed between …
Deaf Anthropology
Deaf anthropology is a field that exists in conversation with but is not reducible to the interdisciplinary field of deaf studies. Deaf anthropology is predicated upon a commitment to understanding deafnesses across time and space while holding on to "deaf" as a category that does something socially, politically, morally, and methodologically. In doing so, deaf anthropology moves beyond compartmentalizing the body, the senses, and disciplinary bo…
Disability, Anonymous Love, and Interworldly Socials in Urban India
This essay considers disability studies scholars' investment in "the social" as a site of rehabilitation, recuperation, and cure in order to argue that in urban India, the case is otherwise: the public often engages with disability through "anonymous love," which produces opportunities for the concretization of disability as a category, for disabled people to exist socially, and for validation of an existing social. I argue, however, that this co…
Entangled Interdependence: Sign Language Interpreting without Recognition in India and Vietnam
Disabled people have achieved more legal recognition from nation-states and societies because of advocacy and institutional efforts such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This is a starting, not an end, point: How does legal recognition trickle down (or not) or become distributed to those who work with disabled people? This article examines this question by ethnographically attending to the experiences o…
Recuperating the bad outcome: Reimagining optimal futures beyond Auditory Verbal Therapy and Applied Behavioral Analysis
This article analyzes convergences in the ways that both deafness and autism are framed as crises that require immediate (and often expensive) professional intervention. Parents receive messages that failure to therapeutically intervene will prevent their children from living normative lives. We demonstrate how therapy techniques such as Auditory Verbal Therapy and Applied Behavioral Analysis have proliferated to address these crises. We explore …
Case conference and para case conference: Asking different questions about disability and structural ableism
What might it mean to change the questions we ask during clinical case conferences and to ask different kinds of questions, both in case conferences and more broadly in our clinics, care conferences and research? How might conducting 'para case conferences' with diverse stakeholders, community members and scholars invigorate conversation and surface different kinds of concerns? By 'para,' I draw from all of the meanings of the prefix, including a…
Coming to terms: Gaza and disability
In this piece, we bear witness to the photos, reels, and videos produced by Palestinians documenting-and trying to survive-genocide in Gaza. Drawing primarily on archives that we have built through engaging with interlocutors, colleagues, and social media platforms, we focus on the realities faced by disabled Gazans and their kin, who urge international disability movement counterparts and disabled communities to support a ceasefire and the broad…
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (14 works) · Disability Rights and Representation (11 works) · Hearing Impairment and Communication (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Anthropology (9 works) · Ethnography (8 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Law (8 works)