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Beyond Plasticity: Cochlear Implants, Family Objects, and Quasi-Neuronal Lives

McGrath, Andrew J
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1504781636219078

Abstract Details

2017, MA, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences: Anthropology.
This thesis examines how pervasive biomedical economies of care have become in the everyday lives of families with children who hear with surgically inserted devices called cochlear implants (CIs). Based on time spent observing the experiences of three such families, including my own, I analyze how contemporary medical epistemologies become entangled both morally and pragmatically in the months and years after diagnosis, surfacing most fluidly at the level of familial relationships. As a way of highlighting the importance of individual family’s worlds for negotiating the experience of biomedical ways of knowing, accompanying the text of my thesis is an experiment in visual collaboration among my research participants and myself. In an attempt to find multiple ways of presenting ethnographic research that traces the affective feeling and resonance of my interlocutors’ worlds, I have worked with them to take photos of objects they use in their everyday lives. I want to think about image making through photography as a seed for each family’s varied resistances to their biotechnological futures. Our acts of collaboration, as experimental and expressive practices, stand as relational proving grounds for cultivating an evolving everyday form of counter-hegemony.
Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Sarah Jackson, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
78 p.
Cultural Anthropology
cochlear implants; circulation; transcorporeality; ontology; materialism; photography

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • McGrath, A. J. (2017). Beyond Plasticity: Cochlear Implants, Family Objects, and Quasi-Neuronal Lives [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1504781636219078

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • McGrath, Andrew. Beyond Plasticity: Cochlear Implants, Family Objects, and Quasi-Neuronal Lives. 2017. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1504781636219078.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • McGrath, Andrew. "Beyond Plasticity: Cochlear Implants, Family Objects, and Quasi-Neuronal Lives." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1504781636219078

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1504781636219078
169
© 2017, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.