Timothy Y. Loh, M.A.

ABSTRACT

Hearing technologies and practices of care in a Jordanian audiology department

Timothy Y. Loh

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork at an audiology department in Amman, this anthropological research project examines the provision of hearing technologies to deaf Jordanians as forms and practices of care (Livingston 2012, Stevenson 2014, McKay 2018). Aside from hearing aids, the department also provides cochlear implants—medical devices, implanted via surgery, that aim to provide people with hearing loss with some electronic access to sound—to deaf Jordanians, in partnership with a state-affiliated initiative that has distributed more than 1,170 cochlear implants since its establishment in 2010. I ask: how do deaf Jordanians engage the cochlear implant and other medical technologies—and the biomedical imaginaries in which they are embedded—within and outside the clinical encounter? The cochlear implant—and to a lesser degree, the hearing aid (Edwards 2010)—was controversial when it was first introduced in North America, where some deaf people saw cochlear implantation as a form of cultural “genocide” (Padden and Humphries 1988; Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan 1996; Ladd 2003). The cochlear implant has not only become increasingly normalized in the U.S. (Mauldin 2016) but has also spread transnationally as a medical technology for deaf people in Japan (Nakamura 2006), India (Friedner 2018), Mexico (Pfister 2019), and elsewhere. As cochlear implants have become more prevalent in Jordan, they have become linked not only to debates about language—as I found during preliminary research in 2019 (Loh 2022)—but also to broader questions about development (cf. Sargent 2019) and political economy in a materially underresourced context where unemployment rates are high. Based on participant observation at the hospital and interviews with clinicians and patients, I argue that care is a useful analytic to understand the ambivalence with which many deaf Jordanians view these technologies, in its doublehanded recognition of how such technologies can be important developmentally—in providing access to speech and presumably better integration into society—but also problematic sociopolitically—in diminishing their sense of belonging to broader deaf collectivities. I draw upon medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and “a disability-centered anthropology of the Middle East” (Sargent 2019) to ethnographically demonstrate the social life of these hearing technologies in Jordan.

BIO

Timothy Y. Loh is a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS). His ethnographic research examines sociality, language, and religion in deaf and signing worlds spanning Jordan, Singapore, and the United States. He is currently conducting dissertation fieldwork in Amman examining deaf Jordanians' engagements with new assistive technologies that have emerged there in the last two decades, including cochlear implants and sign language mobile applications. https://www.timothyyloh.com.