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Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India
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Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India

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Although it is commonly believed that deafness and disability limits a person in a variety of ways, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India describes the two as a source of value in postcolonial India. Michele Friedner argues that the experiences of deaf people offer an important portrayal of contemporary self-making and sociality under new regimes of labor and economy in India. 
 
Friedner contends that deafness actually becomes a source of value for deaf Indians as they interact with nongovernmental organizations, with employers in the global information technology sector, and with the state. In contrast to previous political economic moments, deaf Indians increasingly depend less on the state for education and employment, and instead turn to novel and sometimes surprising spaces such as NGOs, multinational corporations, multilevel marketing businesses, and churches that attract deaf congregants. They also gravitate towards each other. Their social practices may be invisible to outsiders because neither the state nor their families have recognized Indian Sign Language as legitimate, but deaf Indians collectively learn sign language, which they use among themselves, and they also learn the importance of working within the structures of their communities to maximize their opportunities.  
 
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India analyzes how diverse deaf people become oriented toward each other and disoriented from their families and other kinship networks. More broadly, this book explores how deafness, deaf sociality, and sign language relate to contemporary society. 
 
 
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 9, 2015
ISBN9780813573724
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India

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    Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India - Michele Friedner

    Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India

    Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India

    Michele Friedner

    Rutgers University Press

    New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Friedner, Michele, 1978–

    Valuing deaf worlds in urban India / Michele Friedner.

    pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978–0–8135–7061–7 (hardback) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7060–0 (pbk.) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7062–4 (e-book (web pdf))

    1. Deaf—India. 2. Deaf culture—India. 3. People with disabilities—India. 4. Sociology of disability—India. I. Title.

    HV2863.F75 2015

    305.9'0820954—dc232014040074

    A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

    Copyright © 2015 by Michele Friedner

    All rights reserved

    No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

    Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

    In memory of Shmuel Yochanan Friedner

    For Jamie and Saffron

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    List of Abbreviations

    Naming and Translation Practices

    Introduction: Deaf Turns, Deaf Orientations, and Deaf Development

    Chapter 1. Orienting from (Bad) Family to (Good) Friends

    Chapter 2. Converting to the Church of Deaf Sociality

    Chapter 3. Circulation as Vocation

    Chapter 4. Deaf Bodies, Corporate Bodies

    Chapter 5. Enrolling Deafness in Multilevel Marketing Businesses

    Conclusion: India’s Deaf Futures/Reorienting the World

    Appendix: Key Concepts from Indian Sign Language

    Notes

    References

    Index

    About the Author

    Acknowledgments

    I am immensely grateful to my deaf friends and interlocutors in Bangalore and elsewhere in India. Spending time with them—in their schools and homes, on buses, in coffee shops and cafés, and in other social spaces—has been a joy. I thank them for their patience, sense of humor, and love. I thank them for putting up with my many questions and my sometimes incomprehensible Indian Sign Language. I especially want to thank the people who in this book I call Chetan, Sushma, Narayanan, and Radhika. The four were generous guides who have become dear friends. I have wonderful memories of long conversations, cooking delicious meals, and traveling through Bangalore with them; their contributions to my research have made this a richer book (and they have made my life richer as well).

    My first introduction to India’s deaf worlds was through the wonderful women at the organization that I call the Delhi Deaf Women’s League. These women have provided me with endless hospitality, encouragement, and support every time I return to Delhi. I can feel them cheering me on, urging me to finish this book, and teasing me for being so timid at times. I only wish I were able to spend more time at this organization, with these women.

    I was extremely fortunate to be generously welcomed by almost all of the nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and churches with which I interacted. Administrators, human resource executives, and pastors permitted me to attend classes, training sessions, and worship services; hang out in computer rooms and workplaces; and they granted me interviews. I owe much to these organizations. The person whom I call Jaisel Ahuja was one of the first deaf Indians whom I met, and he was very generous with his contacts both before and during my years in India; indeed, it was he who introduced me to many of the organizations and people with whom I subsequently worked, and he has become a dear friend over the years. The person whom I call Atul Deshmukh has also been a wonderful guide to India’s deaf worlds, and I thank him for his gregarious personality and constant honesty. Ruma Roka and Arun Rao have been very helpful over the years and have warmly welcomed me into their organizations and their lives.

    In Bangalore, I thank Vanita, Joella, and Johnny Thomas for providing me with the most beautiful home ever, complete with an orange wall and a coconut tree. I thank Ida, Rebecca, and Kezia Thomas for being lovely neighbors and for bringing me appam from time to time. I thank Sravanthi Dasari and Nanda Kishore for being occasional translators and partners-in-crime; I especially thank Sravanthi for her searing insight and indignation (the two go well together!). I am very grateful to Meenu Bhambani for opening her house to me, feeding me, and imparting many words of wisdom. Thanks as well to Rajneesh Khosla for putting up with me. Also in Bangalore, I thank Asha and Babi Dey and Aban Adenwalla for providing me with historical and background information about the beginning of deaf education in Bangalore, and Rama Chari for sharing her vast knowledge about the state of disability in India. In Chennai, where we lived in 2013–2014, I thank Mr. and Mrs. Balachander for their hospitality as well as the residents of the Dhanalakshmi Avenue Colony for welcoming us into the community and creating a lovely environment in which to write.

    This book project started as a dissertation in the joint Medical Anthropology Program at the University of California, Berkeley—University of California, San Francisco. Although it has been significantly revised, I hope that Sharon Kaufman, Lawrence Cohen, Vincanne Adams, and Gillian Hart see their influence on these pages. I want to especially thank Sharon and Lawrence for being wonderful mentors. Sharon taught me the importance of careful ethnography, while Lawrence was always willing to ruminate and expound upon the most seemingly mundane details, finding beauty and fascination in every (potential) story. At Berkeley, I also wish to thank Rahul Bjorn Parsons for being the best Hindi teacher ever.

    While at Berkeley I received generous funding from the American Institute of Indian Studies, UC Berkeley, the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center, and the National Science Foundation. At the American Institute for Indian Studies, I thank Elise Auerbach for all her help. At Berkeley, I was fortunate to have had Sue Schweik, Devva Kasnitz, Katherine Sherwood, Lakshmi Fjord, and Alison Kafer around as examples of what engaged and (com)passionate disability studies scholars could be like. Outside the university, I learned a great deal from Catherine Kudlick, Corbett O’Toole, and Paul Preston, as well.

    I wrote this book while I was a National Science Foundation–sponsored postdoctoral fellow in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Anthropology program, a program filled with the best colleagues a postdoc could hope for. Stefan Helmreich was a mentor in every sense of the word and has continued to awe me with his generosity and intellect. This book has benefited tremendously from his guidance and enthusiasm and my spirits have benefited from his encouragement and occasional sense of whimsy. I also wish to thank Graham Jones for his willingness to talk through ideas and for guiding me through the writing process. I was especially lucky to be at MIT when Yehuda Goodman was there, and I am grateful for his interest and attention to my work. A book workshop held at MIT and attended by Stefan Helmreich, Heather Paxson, Yehuda Goodman, Smitha Radhakrishnan, and Chris Walley was greatly beneficial to making this book what it currently is, and I want to acknowledge Smitha for her careful, enthusiastic reading and copious notes. Amberly Steward, Irene Hartford, and Rosemarie Hegg were amazing department administrators and helped facilitate my postdoc and organize my book workshop. David Wunsch and John Kelly were my academic and pastoral cheerleaders and helped to make Boston more of a home.

    I also benefited from a book workshop held at the American Institute of Indian Studies 2012 annual conference and I thank the members of my session as well as Susan Wadley and Geraldine Forbes for their input. Frank Bechter, Vandana Chaudhry, Terra Edwards, Mara Green, Alastair Iles, Eunjung Kim, Satendra Kumar, Annelies Kusters, Mike Morgan, and Joan Ostrove read through drafts of chapters. I especially want to acknowledge Frank for his generous engagement with my work (talk about close reading!) and Mara for carefully and painstakingly reading and rereading drafts of chapters. Indeed, Mara read this manuscript multiple times, and I am very much in her debt; she will see herself on these pages.

    The Society for Disability Studies provided me with a community of loving and generous scholars and comrades for which I am very grateful. I especially wish to thank Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, Vandana Chaudhry, Joan Ostrove, Susan Burch, Mara Mills, Catherine Kudlick, Sunaura Taylor, Pamela Block, Devva Kasnitz, Akemi Nishida, Elaine Gerber, and Mike Gill. In India, studies of disability and deafness are in nascent stages, and I am excited to see the field grow. I want to thank Shilpaa Anand, Deepa Palaniappan, Amba Salelkar, Meenu Bhambani, Tanmoy Bhattacharya, James Staples, and Vandana Chaudhry for their engagement, ideas, and support. I am especially appreciative of Renu Addlakha and Jagdish Chander for being my first introductions to the field of disability studies in India. Both have been mentors and sounding boards over the years, generous with their time and advice. I am happy to have Annelies Kusters and Mara Green as sounding boards for all things related to deaf South Asia.

    Mr. V. Gopalakrishnan, an Indian Sign Language expert and consultant from Hyderabad, India, is responsible for the beautiful line drawings in the book; I thank him for his work on these and am very happy to be able to include them here and on the cover. Margaret Case provided excellent copy editing support and Cassandra Evans read and re-read chapters as well. At Rutgers University Press, I want to acknowledge Marilyn Campbell, Jennifer Blanc-Tal, and Allyson Fields for their work on this book. I especially want to thank Marlie Wasserman at the Press for her enthusiasm and support for the project as well as her unfailing honesty and amazingly prompt attention.

    This book could not have been written without support and encouragement from my wonderful friends Naomi Baer, Emilie Cassou, Mara Green, Elizabeth Mazur, Gabrielle Marcus, Karen Thompson, and Rachel Aronowitz as well as my family. My mother, Ann Friedner, came to India twice, even though she swore she never would. I thank her for her unstinting love, support, and encouragement. My sister Karen Friedner visited me in Bangalore, and I thank her for jumping into my research and field sites enthusiastically and making friends with everyone. While my father was not alive to see this project develop or come to fruition, I believe that I learned many of my anthropological skills from him. I have a wonderful family, and this also includes Richard Woolman and Susie, Jim, and Jeff Osborne. Most of all, I am indebted to Jamie Osborne for his patient and steadfast encouragement, his excitement about this project, and his help with thinking, writing, formatting, and living over the years. This book is for him and for our daughter Saffron who, at the age of two, has spent half her life in India. I hope she becomes more fluent in Indian Sign Language than I have.

    Abbreviations

    AIFD All India Federation of the Deaf

    AIISH All India Institute of Speech and Hearing

    ASL American Sign Language

    BDA Bangalore Deaf Association

    BISL Bangalore variety Indian Sign Language

    BPO business process outsourcing

    CBS Chronological Bible Storytelling

    CII Confederation of Indian Industries

    CSI Church of South India

    CSR corporate social responsibility

    DPA Disabled Peoples Association

    HR human resources

    IDCS International Deaf Children’s Society

    IR independent representative

    ISL Indian Sign Language

    ISLRTC Indian Sign Language Research and Training Center

    IT information technology

    ITES information technology enabled services

    JSSPPH JSS Polytechnic for the Physically Handicapped

    LDS Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints

    NAD National Association of the Deaf

    NCPEDP National Centre for Promotion of Employment of Disabled People

    NGO nongovernmental organization

    NIHH National Institute for Hearing Handicapped

    PM prosperity meeting

    RCI Rehabilitation Council of India

    SKID Sheila Kothavala Institute for the Deaf

    SMS Short Message Service

    SSLC secondary school leaving certificate

    UNCRPD United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

    Naming and Translation Practices

    My practice of using pseudonyms may appear to be confusing or erratic. I am motivated by a desire to respect people’s privacy and do no harm, although it is likely that my deaf friends in Bangalore and elsewhere in India will be very aware of what organizations, people, and schools I am writing about. I use pseudonyms for all individuals and for all organizations and entities that have requested that I use pseudonyms. I also use pseudonyms for most schools and educational institutions, nongovernmental organizations and training centers, businesses and corporations, churches and religious organizations, and political/activist organizations. In some cases I have chosen to use the actual names, as I thought that this would be appropriate—in the case of international or national organizations, government institutions, historical deaf schools, or entities and organizations well known to the general public. As such, the text is therefore a mix of pseudonyms and unchanged names. I ask the reader to bear with me.

    My practice of using quotations and rendering my sign language–using interlocutors’ words into text is as follows: sign language has no conventionalized or widespread written form. In representing my interlocutors’ words, I use two methods. I use italics in quotes when I paraphrase my interlocutors’ words. I do this to make it clear to the reader that sign language is a different language from spoken and written language (in this case, mostly English). Many of the signed words and phrases that are repeated throughout the book can be found in the glossary. When I translate my interlocutors’ words from sign language (American Sign Language, varieties of Indian Sign Language, or International Sign) to English and render their words into English grammatical structure, I use quotation marks and I do not italicize. An example of these italicizing and translation practices would be the often-repeated phrase "deaf deaf same, which I translate as I am deaf, you are deaf, we are the same, although I conceptualize this as deaf similitude."

    For translations between Hindi or Kannada and English, I write the Hindi or Kannada words in italics using their commonly accepted American English spelling, and I provide a translation immediately following the italicized word.

    Introduction

    Deaf Turns, Deaf Orientations, and Deaf Development

    Sunday Circulations

    It was late morning on a Sunday in June 2009. True Life Bible Fellowship, one of Bangalore’s eight deaf churches, had just finished its weekly fellowship. Energized by a particularly spirited discussion of "question answer," or question and answer, in which fellowship attendees discussed their relationships with their normal families and the importance of helping other deaf people, attendees chatted on the lawn of the theological college where the meeting had been held. In addition to sharing news and information, many attendees were deciding what to do that afternoon. The options included a statewide Jehovah’s Witness conference where there would be sign language interpreters, a meeting to discuss disability pensions and government certifications sponsored by a Bangalore-based deaf nongovernmental organization (NGO), and an information and recruitment session for a multilevel marketing business with a deaf leader.

    Many of those present decided to attend the multilevel marketing business meeting, and so a diverse group of young deaf people—including manual laborers, business process outsourcing employees, and hospitality sector workers from different economic, caste, religious, and geographic backgrounds—boarded a bus to go to the meeting location. The deaf business leader had strategically rented the courtyard of the sole college in Bangalore that provided sign language interpreters, and as a result many of Bangalore’s deaf people knew where the meeting was to be held. On the bus, I sat with Zahra, a young woman who worked as a barista (or silent brewmaster) at Café Coffee Day, one of Bangalore’s new coffee chains. As we traveled through the city, we chatted about Zahra’s job, the many deaf churches and deaf-focused NGOs in Bangalore, and the fact that we had attended other churches and multilevel marketing business recruitment sessions together. Along the way, the bus stopped at a major transit connection point and two deaf women climbed on.

    I knew one of the women from a basic computer course at the Disabled Peoples Association (DPA), a Bangalore-based NGO with a vocational training program, although I had never met the other woman, who was older, perhaps in her forties. Zahra did not know either of them but we quickly started chatting after ascertaining that we were all deaf or "deaf deaf same, and that we all had some degree of fluency in Bangalore variety Indian Sign Language (BISL). The two women told us that they were coming from another deaf church and that they were on their way home. When they told her which church they were coming from, Zahra remarked that she had previously attended their church but that she did not think that it helped her to develop. She then suggested that they switch to the True Life Bible Fellowship because it was better for development." Then the younger woman asked Zahra questions about her job and which NGOs she had gone to for vocational training and job placement help. In the span of just a few minutes, the four of us had an intense discussion (common in deaf networks) about churches, Zahra’s job and the older woman’s lack of one, and the various deaf-focused NGOs in Bangalore. The conversation was really about deaf development and which Bangalore-based deaf resources could best facilitate this development. A few stops later, the two women got off the bus, and a new stream of deaf people climbed on, also heading to the multilevel marketing business meeting.

    The three events that day—the Jehovah’s Witness assembly, NGO meeting, and multilevel marketing recruitment session—represented three different paths toward what my deaf friends called "deaf develop, or deaf development. Deaf people in Bangalore and elsewhere in India frequently discussed deaf development and deliberated about where it could be found. My deaf friends defined deaf development as the emergence of deaf-centered, and therefore sign language–centered, structures and institutions that help deaf people develop language, educational, economic, social, and moral skills for living in the world as both a member of deaf sociality and part of a larger normal world. These structures and institutions would include deaf-run and deaf-administered schools, NGOs, businesses, churches, and old-age homes. Deaf development will result in deaf people’s becoming equal to normal people—although it will not result in their becoming the same. Desiring deaf development requires that people take what I call deaf turns" and become oriented toward each other. Going forward, I treat deaf development as an analytic category and the desire for it as an ethnographic fact.

    My deaf friends strongly believed that they had to actively seek deaf development on their own. This is because the needs and desires of sign language–using deaf people have largely been invisible to both the state and the public at large (comprising people who are not deaf and who do not use sign language). There is no reliable data on how many deaf people, sign language–using or not, live in India.¹ The Indian government has not recognized Indian Sign Language (ISL), and India’s landmark legislation on behalf of people with disabilities, the 1995 Persons with Disability (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights, and Full Participation) Act does not say anything about sign language. The Rehabilitation Council of India, the government body that oversees special schools and teacher training programs, only offers a fifteen-day sign language training for teachers, and most deaf schools do not provide deaf children with literacy or general education skills. Although India signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which specifically mentions deaf people as a linguistic minority and the importance of sign language in deaf people’s lives, there has been little or no implementation of the convention. In addition, although India’s eleventh five-year plan (2007–2012) called for the formation of an independent sign language research and training institute, there are no signs of such an institute being established. Deaf people therefore generally believe that the state has failed to provide them with deaf development and that their social, moral, and economic practices are invisible to outsiders. Thus conversations like the one that I had on the bus with Zahra and the other two deaf women take place frequently, and often with some urgency, as well.

    Figure I.1. Development as signed in Bangalore variety Indian Sign Language. Credit: V. Gopalakrishnan.

    The experience of living in India’s urban centers is changing for deaf people. On the one hand, the emergence of neoliberal political economic policies means that fewer social and economic protections, social services, and public sector employment opportunities are available. On the other hand, multinational corporations can be found in information technology enabled services (ITES), hospitality, and other sectors that offer new structures of employment opportunity as well as funding for disability-focused vocational training programs and nongovernmental organizations.² Vocational training centers, churches, and multilevel marketing businesses that cater specifically to deaf people offer new forms of social, educational, and economic support and new spaces for creating aspirations for deaf development. Indeed, while Bangalore exists as an exceptional case study of how India has been transforming over the last two decades, my deaf friends may also be exceptional case studies of Indians’ changing relationship with the state; they depend less on the state for education, employment, and personal development and instead turn to NGOs, multinational corporations, multilevel marketing businesses, other internationally funded organizations such as churches and missionary organizations, and to each other.

    This book therefore explores how deaf people circulate through structures and institutions—schools, workplaces, churches and other fellowship spaces, and multilevel marketing businesses—in search of deaf development. However, despite repeated and overlapping circulation, deaf development rarely actually takes place in these spaces. What does take place is the production of deaf selves and deaf socialities (or deaf social practices and processes). Deaf selves and socialities are produced through feelings of "deaf deaf same. This is a common sentiment and statement in Bangalore’s deaf worlds, and it is a way of expressing deaf similtude or a shared experience of being in the world based on common sensorial experience, use of sign language, and an awareness that structural barriers exist for deaf people. Feelings of deaf deaf same, combined with circulating together through the same spaces, produce deaf turns. I argue that as deaf people move together through spaces, they also turn toward each other. Sara Ahmed stresses the importance of turning for the creation of new subject positions. She writes: Depending on which way one turns, different worlds might even come into view. If such turns are repeated over time, then bodies acquire the very shape of such direction" (2006, 15). The concept of taking a deaf turn foregrounds acts of movement in space and in sentiment. Deaf turns result in deaf selves and deaf orientations.

    Thomas Csordas very productively connects the creation of selves and orientations. According to Csordas, the self is neither substance nor entity, but an indeterminate capacity to engage or become oriented in the world, characterized by effort and reflexivity. Self processes are orientational processes in which aspects of the world are thematized with the result that the self is objectified, most often as a ‘person’ with a cultural identity or set of identities (1997, 5). Building on Csordas’s work on how selves are created, I examine how my deaf friends take deaf turns and produce deaf selves and deaf orientations. I argue that there is a specific practice that is required to enact these deaf orientations. This is a practice that I call sameness work. Through sameness work, deaf people learn to adjust their expectations and negotiate class, caste, geographic, educational, religious, and gender differences in order to productively study, work, socialize, and spend time together. As part of sameness work, deaf orientations are cultivated and foregrounded.

    Sameness work also manifests itself as copying or imitation as deafs attempt to model themselves after other successful deaf people and follow in their footsteps. While part of sameness work, copying also establishes deaf hierarchies in which deafs with good sign language skills, access to information, and strong deaf social networks are seen as more developed people who should be imitated. These hierarchies may not, and often do not, map neatly onto class or caste hierarchies.³ For example, a deaf person with deaf parents from a lower-class background may have excellent sign language skills that would enable him to cultivate a vast deaf social network. Another lower-class deaf person might receive good (or good enough) free primary and secondary education and vocational training, which would position her to work as a deaf teacher or community-based rehabilitation worker, therefore placing her at the top of deaf hierarchies. Or, as a final example, a visiting American Christian missionary may financially and logistically help a low-caste deaf young man attend Bible college and subsequently establish his own church. Thus, although hierarchies do exist, "deaf deaf same" and shared desires for deaf development often privilege sameness over difference in deaf worlds.

    To be sure, negotiating deaf hierarchies and engaging in sameness work can be ambivalent and fraught. Sameness work is by no means a seamless process, and it requires active disorientations and reorientations. As I discuss in Chapter 1, deaf people learn how to disorient from their families in order to take deaf turns and reorient themselves toward other deaf people. In addition, deaf sociality is not always harmonious, and deaf people must negotiate shared histories of schooling, working together, and socializing that often involve disagreement and tension. Indeed, adjusting and negotiating sameness and difference are very much a part of the active work (or the effort that Csordas mentions) of becoming a deaf person oriented toward other deaf people.

    Unlike Csordas, however, I do not utilize the analytic of identity in discussing deaf development because it has played a problematic role in the discipline of Deaf Studies and in anthropological work on deafness. Indeed, most work posits identity as a starting and end point.⁴ Influential Deaf Studies scholar and activist Paddy Ladd has proposed the important concept of Deafhood, which he defines as the existential state of Deaf ‘being-in-the-world.’ According to Ladd, Deafhood is not seen as a finite state but as a process by which Deaf individuals come to actualise their Deaf identity, positing that those individuals construct that identity around several differently ordered sets of priorities and principles, which are affected by various factors such as nation, era and class (2003, xviii). Although I appreciate that the concept of Deafhood is based upon a process, the teleological endpoint is that deaf people will actualize their deaf identity.⁵ In contrast, I believe that the analytic of identity perpetuates a form of both analytical and ontological violence by fixing people in space, time, and place (Haraway 1991). Instead of the fixed category of identity, this book is concerned with both the fluidity and the constraints of circulations. I analyze what kinds of selves, orientations, and socialities are produced through circulation.⁶

    Multiple Registers and Temporalities of Development

    Deaf development as a concept and as an analytic encompasses development across multiple registers; it includes social, moral, and political economic development. Here I draw inspiration from Anand Pandian’s work on the multiple registers of development; analyzing the ethical and physical toil that Tamil agrarian workers engage in, Pandian writes: Development is one of the most important objects of desire, imagination, and struggle in contemporary India. What I mean by development is the promise of a gradual improvement of life, and the fulfillment of its potential for progressive growth through deliberate endeavors in transformation (2009, 6). As Pandian reminds us, development as a concept bundles together social, moral, and political economic practices and provides opportunities for individual and collective transformation (also see

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