I am a social and medical anthropologist whose work examines both the category of and experience of “deafness” and “disability,” particularly in urban India. I am interested in how political economic changes in India have created new opportunities and constraints for deaf and disabled people in the arenas of employment, education, politics, religion, and everyday life. In working with sign language-using deaf people, I also attend to the limits of disability as both a juridical and legislative category and as an explanatory concept within social theory. Disability has become a global category and is fixed in international documents and treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). How do such framings shape deaf and disabled people’s attempts to attain recognition, live inhabitable lives, and create futures?

My 2015 book Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India (Rutgers University Press) analyzes how sign language-using young adults in urban India work toward “deaf development,” or futures in which deaf social, moral, and economic practices are foregrounded. These practices – both actual and projected – include teaching and helping other deaf people, sharing news and information, and creating deaf institutions such as schools, businesses, and old-age homes. As educational and livelihood opportunities for deaf people change in contemporary urban India, deaf young adults have begun to circulate through novel spaces, including vocational training centers, information technology offices, pyramid scheme recruitment sessions, and Christian churches and fellowships. In contrast to the majority of academic work on disability, which analyzes the experiences of disabled people through the lens of stigma or deprivation, the book analyzes how deafness and disability enable new regimes of value to emerge for deaf people themselves, NGOs, corporations and other employers, and the state.