ABSTRACT
Cochlear implants (CIs) are increasingly considered the “gold standard” in intervening on deafness and countries around the world have started programs providing them to children. This chapter draws from ethnographic research conducted from 2016 to 2022 in Indian clinics, hospitals, schools, and therapy centers and interviews with families, surgeons, government administrators, cochlear implant corporation representatives, audiologists, and speech and language therapists, among other stakeholders. The chapter analyzes the distinct kinds of sensory infrastructures that bring a normative sensorium—through cochlear implanted hearing—into being and how relationships between the state, CI manufacturer, family, and individual change over time and produce different kinds of outcomes. The chapter argues for the importance of exploring how the sense of hearing—and other senses—are politically, economically, and socially produced and maintained over the life course. The chapter also argues for the importance of intersensory research and for seeing all research as intersensory.
