Sensory futures: Deafness and cochlear implant infrastructures in India By Michele IlanaFriedner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 288 pp.

Michele Friedner's Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures in India argues that who we are as sensory beings is up for grabs. In this ethnographic study of cochlear implant (CI) technology (implanted neurological devices that allow previously d/Deaf recipients to hear through signals to the brain) in India, Friedner argues that CI technology and associated practices are designed to cultivate a particular kind of normative sensory perception in implant recipients. Friedner observes that, in order to fashion deaf recipients as speaking subjects, CI technology privileges certain frequencies of human speech, to the exclusion of other kinds of sounds, from leaves rustling, to a footstep on the stairs. Observing the cultivation of d/Deaf children as speaking and hearing social and sensory subjects through government programs that provide CIs and related therapies, Friedner asks, “what kind of sensorium is this?” (p. 11), and moreover, what kinds of social futures does the cultivation of such sensoria proffer and foreclose? Deploying medical anthropology's insistence that curative practices are culturally contingent, and a queer phenomenological approach to normalcy, Friedner argues that the sensory futures imagined by the implementation of CI technology in India are the product of specific sociotechnical infrastructures. In a text rich with provocative questions, Friedner delivers a stirring example of what she elsewhere dubs “Deaf Anthropology.” Drawing on fieldwork conducted in India between 2018 and 2021, Friedner (who herself uses bilateral cochlear implants) investigates how doctors, parents (mainly mothers), speech and language pathologists and audiologists, politicians, technology workers, and NGO workers fashion infrastructures that seek to produce deaf children as hearing adults. While a CI surgery is partially funded by Indian governmental programs, the story doesn't end there for the bearer of the implant and their family; Friedner observes that constructing the infrastructure for a child's sensory future requires constant work, considerable expense, and ongoing maintenance. Throughout the book, Friedner assumes a stance of critical ambivalence, as method for encountering and questioning a topic that is at once hotly publicly debated and has profound personal stakes (p. 28). As a CI user herself, Friedner weaves her own lived experience in the frame, including past audiological records and surprising ways in which she appeared as “hearing” or “deaf” in different moments of fieldwork. While ethnographers, classically, are duty bound to represent the world as it is, rather than as it ought to be, as our discipline grapples with a move toward transparently addressing the moral stakes of the research subject matter, Friedner's text and her insistence that leaning into ambivalence can produce critical questioning and uncover normative narrative assumptions, may offer a road map of interest to many. Following recent trends in the field, Friedner refuses to align neatly with long-standing debates between pure oralism (speech) and manualism (sign) for d/Deaf children. Instead, Friedner is interested in ambiguity—personal and political—that comes from and produces ways of hearing that are sometimes miraculous, and sometimes embarrassingly insufficient, or shot through with complicity in the inequities of global capitalism. The first chapter traces the politico-legal infrastructure of government policies involving partnerships with for-profit corporations that manufacture CI devices, and the historically situated practices by which distribution to citizens takes place. Friedner observes troubling elements: children in India receive old-model CI processors that are considered unsuitably outdated in North America, but repackaged and sold to the Indian government as an affordable option; mismatches between the understanding that CIs “make deaf children hearing” among surgeons and politicians, and the lived reality described by therapists, recipients, and families; and a pattern of politicians publicizing “gifts” to disabled citizens for political gain. The second chapter further investigates auditory verbal therapy, a set of practices developed in North America, that now circulates in India to teach deaf and CI-implanted children to learn to listen and use spoken language. The third chapter explores family experiences of encountering these therapeutic approaches, and the cultivation of a lived infrastructure to support the development of speaking and listening children that involves mothers constantly narrating every moment of life to saturate children with spoken language. Such practices require tremendous labor from families, especially mothers. In chapter 4, Friedner exposes a major problem with the CI schemes in India: the lack of ongoing support for device maintenance and batteries following the initial implantation and mapping period supported by government programs. For many families, Friedner shows, the cost of caring for the device is beyond a family's means, yet, to care for the device comes to be coded as a kind of care for the child (p. 127). In chapter 5, Friedner considers what it means to “become normal” for deaf children who receive CIs. Contrary to much existing scholarship in the anthropology of becoming, which frames “becoming” as always liberatory, in this case, Friedner observes, becoming normal is not liberatory but constricting: to become normal means to “pass” for hearing. In the conclusion to the book, Friedner calls for a departure from unisensory training toward a sensory infrastructure that accounts for multiple ways of communicating and inhabiting the world. An appendix offers several composite case studies of possible CI trajectories based on families Friedner encountered during fieldwork. In closing, Friedner writes, “Sensory infrastructures—both inside and outside the body—are always in flux, despite attempts to fix them as solid and finished. … Becoming normal requires constant maintenance” (p. 212). Sensory Futures traces the infrastructures of CI technological implementation and maintenance across multiple sites and locales in India: clinics, therapy offices, homes, schools. The frame is national: moving between states, between castes and socioeconomic groups, and across urban and rural locations, Friedner follows news stories and institutional sites from Mumbai to Chennai to Bangalore. This framing has an important effect, allowing Friedner to trace the broad impacts of government CI policy and how the resulting narrative affects children and families. Some readers, however, might long for a single material place or institutional site that another ethnographic approach might settle into. Others might wish Friedner would go a step further in her discussion of certain injustices, for instance, by condemning the implantation of outdated CIs, or the effects of the Indian government's disinvestment in Indian Sign Language schools. Friedner's ambivalent questioning invites a diversity of readers with an interest in biotechnology, d/Deafness, communication, and governmentality in contemporary India. Her approach invites readers to consider the possibility that the complex sensory futures of those living with cochlear implants cannot be summed up in neat moral packages for or against the particular technological intervention, but rather, must be addressed as always already complete experiences of manifold and messy human sociality.

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