Paperback
Biotech’s sensory futures: unequal access, narrowing possibilities, call for multisensory worlds.

Sensory Futures

Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures in India

$82.83

  • Paperback

    288 pages

  • Release Date

    3 October 2022

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Summary

Revealing inequalities and sensory hierarchies embedded in the latest medical technologies and global biotechnical markets

What happens when cochlear implants, heralded as the first successful bionic technologies, make their way around the globe and are provided by both states and growing private markets? As Sensory Futures follows these implants from development to domestication and their unequal distribution in India, Michele Ilana Friedner explores biotech…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781517912130
ISBN-10:151791213X
Author:Michele Ilana Friedner
Publisher:University of Minnesota Press
Imprint:University of Minnesota Press
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:288
Release Date:3 October 2022
Weight:400g
Dimensions:38mm x 140mm x 216mm
A-Format
B-Format
Sensory Futures by Michele Ilana Friedner - ISBN: 9781517912130
140 × 216 mm
C-Format
A4
mm / in
What They're Saying

Critics Review

“Michele Friedner’s book is a gem-I can’t think of anything else like it. Scaling from the pronunciation of ’s’ by a deaf American child who will someday become an ethnographer to Indian state partnerships with biotech corporations, we encounter many ways to be hearing and deaf. And we see this communicative abundance whittled away by repressive transnational infrastructures as well as local rules, tests, and disability bureaucracies. To my mind, Sensory Futures is the union of medical anthropology, STS, and disability studies at its finest.”-Mara Mills, cofounder and codirector, NYU Center for Disability Studies

“Sensory Futures compels us to question what it means to live with disability as an ongoing process of becoming. Michele Friedner excels at describing the everyday demands of disability and normality in India. Engaging, insightful, and careful, this extraordinary book spotlights the reshaping of state power and technological promise through the everyday intimacies of multisensory life.”-Harris Solomon, author of Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma

“Friedner writes in a reader-friendly style, blending autoethnographic narrative and a review of multiple ethnographic case studies; describing medical and biotechnical literature; and describing Indian government special education mandates about deaf children.”-CHOICE

“Sensory Futures provides a rich and comprehensive account of the journey of a cochlear implant from the supplier to the individual and tries to elaborate on the nature of communication, which needs to be understood as constantly in flux, messy, and, most importantly, multisensory.”-Ethos Journal

“There is an authentic narrative to the stories that delve deep into the author’s personal CI experiences, as well as those of medical professionals, parents, and children, paired powerfully with disability and deaf history.”-H-Net Reviews

About The Author

Michele Ilana Friedner

Michele Ilana Friedner is associate professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She is author of Valuing Deaf Worlds in India.

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