More than one billion people live with hearing loss, making deafness one of the most common disabilities in the world. Despite the size of deaf communities and their rich cultural histories, in the Western world deafness is perceived primarily as a medical problem requiring a fix. In nineteenth-century Britain the shift from viewing deafness as auditory difference to framing it as a condition in need of medical intervention came at the insistence of an emerging group of professionals: aurists. Echoes of Care describes how British ear specialists sought to reshape deafness as a curable affliction that they were uniquely able to treat. Navigating a medical landscape fraught with professional rivalries and public distrust about the likelihood of a cure, aurists extended their authority towards key sites of intervention - the census, school medical testing, public health, deaf schools - to argue for the necessity of specialist care. Beneath the surface of these claims lay deeper questions about access to healthcare, cultural perceptions of disability, and the rise of eugenics.

About the speaker

Jaipreet Virdi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria, Canada, whose research focuses on the ways medicine and technology impact the lived experiences of disabled people. Born in Kuwait to Sikh parents, Virdi lost her hearing at age four to bacterial meningitis. By age six, her working-class family immigrated to Toronto, Ontario where she would later attend a school for deaf and hard-of-hearing children. A product of “mainstreamed” education, Virdi learned to lipread and rely on her hearing aids. She received first her masters, then her doctorate, from the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She is working on two new research projects. The first is with the collaborative CIHR-funded project, Pelvic Health and Public Health in Canada, investigating how the embodied experience of endometriosis shapes disability, and how collective activism shapes the way in which endo sufferers came to understand the disease and its professed treatments, such as Depo-Provera. Her second project historicizes how disabled people tinkered with their prostheses and perceived their devices to be prosthetic extensions of themselves that were crucial for their self-crafting of normalcy. Through case studies of users adopting what Virdi refers to as “the disabled gaze,” this project forces us to confront how disabled people challenged ableist assumptions about their bodies, and claimed their own spaces to craft their identity.