Although it is commonly believed that deafness and disability limits a person in a variety of ways, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India describes the two as a source of value in postcolonial India. Michele Friedner argues that the experiences of deaf people offer an important portrayal of contemporary self-making and sociality under new regimes of labor and economy in India. Friedner contends that deafness actually becomes a source of value for deaf Indians as they interact with nongovernmental organizations, with employers in the global information technology sector, and with the state. In contrast to previous political economic moments, deaf Indians increasingly depend less on the state for education and employment, and instead turn to novel and sometimes surprising spaces such as NGOs, multinational corporations, multilevel marketing businesses, and churches that attract deaf congregants. They also gravitate towards each other. Their social practices may be invisible to outsiders because neither the state nor their families have recognized Indian Sign Language as legitimate, but deaf Indians collectively learn sign language, which they use among themselves, and they also learn the importance of working within the structures of their communities to maximize their opportunities. Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India analyzes how diverse deaf people become oriented toward each other and disoriented from their families and other kinship networks. More broadly, this book explores how deafness, deaf sociality, and sign language relate to contemporary society.

The book explores the lived reality of parenting and caring for children with autism in contemporary urban India. It is based on a qualitative, ethnographic study of families of children with autism as they negotiate the tricky terrain of identifying their child s disability, obtaining a diagnosis, accessing appropriate services and their on-going efforts to come to terms with and make sense of their child s unique subjectivity and mode of being. It examines the gendered dimensions of coping and care-giving and the differential responses of mothers and fathers, siblings and grandparents and the extended family network to this complex and often extremely challenging condition. The book tackles head on the sombre question, What will happen to the child after the parents are gone ? It also critically examines the role of the state, civil society and legal and institutional frameworks in place in India and undertakes a case study of Action for Autism ; a Delhi-based NGO set up by parents of children with autism. This book also draws upon the author s own engagement with her child’ s disability and thus lends an authenticity born out of lived experience and in-depth understanding. It is a valuable addition to the literature in the sociology of the family and disability studies.

This book examines the state of art in disability studies, focusing on the Indian context, as well as the broader South Asian situation. It presents interdisciplinary perspectives on the basic idea, evolution, practices and challenges of researching and teaching disability studies at various higher education institutions and in other civil society spaces. The chapters address a range of related themes, including activism, development policies, research, pedagogy, spatial and social access, caste and gender representations and rights-based discourses. Given the scope of its coverage, the book is of interest to scholars and students in area of humanities, education, law, sociology and social work, political science development and disability studies.

Innovation in Deaf Studies explores deaf scholars' research practice in Deaf Studies and highlights innovations in the field by foregrounding deaf ontologies and how they inform researchers' theoretical frameworks, positionalities, and methodologies.

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 biotechnical intervention in the realm of disability and its implications for state politics in the Global South. A signing and speaking deaf bilateral cochlear implant user, Friedner weaves personal reflections into this fine-grained ethnography of everyday negotiations, activist aspirations, and the space of the family. She places sensory anthropology in conversation with disability studies to analyze how normative sensoria are cultivated and the pursuit of listening and speaking capability is enacted. She argues that the conditions of potentiality that have emerged through cochlear implantation have, in fact, resulted in ever narrower understandings of future life possibilities. Rejecting sensory hierarchies that privilege audition, Friedner calls for multisensory, multimodal, and multipersonal ways of relating to the world. Sensory Futures explores deaf people’s desires to create habitable worlds and grapple with what their futures might look like, in India and beyond, amid a surge in both biotechnical interventions and disability rights activism. With implications for a broad range of disability experiences, this sensitive, in-depth research focuses on the specific experiences of deaf people, both children and adults, and the structural, political, and social possibilities offered by both biotechnological and social “cures.”

Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption.

Making Disability Modern: Design Histories brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary and national perspectives to examine how designed objects and spaces contributes to the meanings of ability and disability from the late 18th century to the present day, and in homes, offices, and schools to realms of national and international politics. The contributors reveal the social role of objects - particularly those designed for use by people with disabilities, such as walking sticks, wheelchairs, and prosthetic limbs - and consider the active role that makers, users and designers take to reshape the material environment into a usable world. But it also aims to make clear that definitions of disability-and ability-are often shaped by design.