Gaofeng Qi

Assistive technologies (ATs) are designed to improve the physical conditions of disabled people. Unlike other technologies that are built for as many users as possible, ATs are merely for physically disabled people, with the intention of “transforming” them into able-bodied individuals. According to science and technology studies (STS), ATs are more than a subject to be examined among its designers and evaluated by its intended effects. ATs are designed, produced, circulated and adopted in a network of national health policies, medical discourses, cultural perceptions of the body and economic transactions, which highlights their social implications and calls for theories and methodologies from the social sciences.

Medical studies tend to claim that the cochlear implant (CI) is one of the most prominent and successful ATs. Early pioneers from medicine and engineering valued the CI for their potential to “cure” deafness. The CI’s developmental trajectory shows that this device has been enmeshed in the trajectories of material science and sociocultural discourses of other communities, especially their potential users, deaf people themselves. The CI’s impacts on deaf culture, deaf identities, medical negotiations, embodiment experience, power relations and the circulation of technologies are being extensively discussed in the medical and health sciences, while its adoption and implementation among users themselves have not been well explored from the perspectives of medical anthropology and STS.

Drawing on disability studies, STS and critical medical anthropology, this PhD research explores the implementation and adoption of the CI in China, an assistive technology widely used for deaf people to restore partial sense of hearing. The research is not only concerned with the intended effects of this technology, but rather with its social implications such as economic barriers as well as the production of socially and politically ambiguous identities caused by this technological “biosociality”, the habituation difficulties of the device for implantees, the biased national campaigning to promote this device over deaf education, and medical-commercial-social networks of “enabling” and “disabling” implantees. Overall, this research aims to locate CIs in the medical setting and in the lived experiences of implantees in order to understand the technological, medical and lived network through the habituation of CIs. Methodologically, this research involves conducting ethnographic fieldwork on the life course of CIs and the experiences of implantees in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, in southern China where I will interview various participants mostly in the hospital and the affiliated rehabilitation training center.

Initial research in this project shows that the implementation of the CI in China can be traced back to 1995 when the first unilateral cochlear implantation surgery was performed by Chinese and Australian medical professionals at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, China, and the first pediatric implantation in 1997. Before the first clinical implementation in China, the modern prototype CI was tested and trialed in Europe and the US as early as the 1960s. Outside China, the CI has had to contend not only with the bottleneck of material science research at the time, but also with criticism from the local deaf community and other social observers. Cultural criticism of a highly ableist agenda and the commercialization of technology continues to rage in the case of CI today. However, CI is not as problematized in China as it is in the West, and the technology is taken for granted as the main medical and social solution for people with profound deafness and hearing difficulties.

Supervisor of the PhD project: Prof. Dr. Hansjörg Dilger

Funding: Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC)

Duration: 2023-2027 (Expected)