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ABSTRACT
As cochlear implants become the gold standard in intervening on deafness around the world, teachers of deaf children are increasingly expected to have technological expertise and to ensure that cochlear implants, and other hearing technology, are being used and that they are working. Students are only considered “ready to learn” if they are using their technology. Drawing from ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews with educators, families, surgeons, speech and language therapists, and audiologists in Indian cities, this article mobilises two conceptual frameworks from medical anthropology and public health – the “biotechnical embrace” and the “structural competency framework” to argue that teachers of deaf children, both in India and internationally, need to think and work beyond technology. Ultimately, focusing on a child does not mean focusing (only) on technology but rather on seeing a child as enmeshed in social, political, educational, and economic structures and relations. Expanding educators’ focus to consider micro and macro scales is especially urgent now, as countries around the world implement programmes in which technology is the goal.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank all interlocutors in India, especially the deaf students, families, teachers, and administrators who so patiently and generously spent time with her. Much gratitude to Rajani Vaidya for research and translation support. She would also like to thank Kristin Snoddon and Rachel O'Neill for working on the special issue with her as well as two anonymous reviewers and the DEI editors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Increasingly, practitioners speak about the importance of getting people into the “speech string bean,” which is located at the very top of the speech banana. A person who is hearing in the string bean will hear about 90% of what is said. In contrast, a person who is hearing at the bottom of the banana will hear only 10% of what is said. See the brief video “Audiology Fruit and the String Bean,” Hearing First, accessed November 14, 2023, https://www.hearingfirst.org. Perusing the AG Bell's annual conferences and seminars schedules provides ample evidence of the focus on technology in these settings.
2 Human Subjects Research/Institutional Review Board approval was received for this research first from the University of California at Berkeley and more recently from the University of Chicago Social Sciences IRB.
3 See https://www.ndcs.org.uk/about-us/news-and-media/latest-news/horrendous-children-s-audiology-failings-at-nhs-lothian/ about Scotland and https://www.premier.sa.gov.au/media-releases/news-items/media-release125 on South Australia, as examples.