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What happens when we treat hearing as an economic duty, and global tech corporations turn assistive devices into a lifetime commitment?
In this episode of The Good Robot, Eleanor Drage sits down with medical anthropologist Michele Friedner (University of Chicago) to discuss her groundbreaking book, Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures in India. Together, they dismantle the normative project of "normalization" and expose the immense, hidden labor required to keep assistive technologies up and running.
From the strict boundaries placed on mothers in auditory-verbal therapy sessions to the global shadow economies keeping obsolete devices "on-air," Friedner shares a deeply personal and poignant look at what happens when tech forces a narrowing of the human experience. Ultimately, she points us toward a more beautiful alternative: "fugitive sensing", where multi-sensory care, touch, and love actively resist an ableist failure of the imagination.
Reading List:
- Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India
- Deaf and Incarcerated in the U.S.
- The Obsolescence Issue
- Feminist, Queer, Crip
- Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds
Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo
