From the Hands of Quacks

"Writing, which used to be an easy and seamless movement between my brain and fingers, is…different." A life update and summary of my resent writing and interviews.

This update is far overdue. As some of you know from Twitter, in October 2021 I had surgery for stage-4 endometriosis, which led to the discovery of a concerning tumor and then an official diagnosis of ovarian cancer. A second surgery was delayed for nearly three months because of the Omicron surge which raised worrying concerns about the cancer spreading (it did, but only slightly), followed by…

READ: Black Bars, White Text

Though the history of closed captioning has largely been framed as a history of legislative changes for accessibility and technological progress that turned captioning decoder set-top boxes into decoder chips, it is also a social history.Captioning emerged out of protest. Read my latest essay on the history of closed captioning and protests, for the Literature and Medicine Front Matter section.

WATCH: In Conversation with Katie Booth

On May 3, 2021, I joined Katie Booth, author of The Invention of Miracles: Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness (Simon & Schuster, 2021) in a virtual conversation about deafness, sign language, and Bell’s oralist legacy, hosted by the Massachusetts Historical Society. The recording is now available, enjoy!

Thank you and good bye (for now).

From the Hands of Quacks began in 2010 as an outlet for me to share interesting materials I encountered while researching for my PhD dissertation. It’s then expanded to discuss matters related to healthcare, deafness, and medical trauma. I’ve shared interesting, quirky, and curious medical history images on the Facebook page–which has nearly 6,000 followers–and have enjoyed the lively discussions…

READ: Let’s use bold, beautiful hearing aids to celebrate deafness

Expanding the breadth of hearing aid design beyond discretion opens possibilities for imagining how fashion and style merge to celebrate, rather than diminish, deaf identity. Some people prefer concealable aids, and that’s OK too; deaf experience is a spectrum and there’s no one way of being deaf. However, moving away from the expectation that assistive technologies need to be concealed or…

READ: Why Won’t Nike use the word ‘Disabled’?

In disability-centric designs, there’s a very specific way that internal grassroots efforts are sold to the powers that be. Executives are pitched on the mass appeal of accessibility, on the basis that by designing for a disabled person, everyone benefits. This highly simplistic view has become one of the core tenets of so-called inclusive design. And while there is a traceable history of this…

LISTEN: What The World Demands Of Deaf People

I think we also need to shift away from discourses about hearing technology as being essentially medical. I had this tremendous, lively conversation on Twitter with other people who use hearing aid or have cochlear implants. And the conversation was sparked by me watching Lady Gaga perform at the inauguration. And she had these really beautiful gold earbuds that I know it’s for music, so they can…

January tends to be my writing-only month, so I have fallen behind with my news updates. Rather than sending out several posts, I’ve condensed the latest updates in this digest. I’m honored to receive the 2020 Gerard J. Mangone Young Scholar Award from the University of Delaware’s Francis Alison Society. The award recognizes promising and accomplished young faculty. I am honored in the Arts,…

WATCH: my talk for Disability History Month at Liverpool John Moore's University on "What Does an Accessible Future Look Like?"

“What does an Accessible Future Look like?” For International Day of Persons with Disabilities, I gave a talk for Liverpool John Moores University’s Disability History Month event along with Jane Cordell and Hormoz Ahmadzadeh of ResultCIC.

REVIEW: Times Higher Education

The most striking thing about Jaipreet Virdi’s book is how it confirms that hearing loss isn’t a minor annoyance that afflicts a few people. Rather, with tremendous archival work, she shows us that, over the past three centuries, Anglo-American culture has been virtually obsessed with trying to cure deafness. The deaf person becomes the icon of the diminished citizen. The sheer number of…

Virdi sees recent technology developed without accessibility in mind as “a reflection of how society denies and ignores disabled people rather than perceive them as full participants who should have access to all sorts of content.” As event organizers switch modes and platforms, Virdi asserts, “As a standard, captioning, ASL interpreters, and image descriptions should be mandatory at all online…

INTERVIEW: “The End of Deafness”

Before cochlear implants and hearing aids, there were dubious treatments like electrotherapy and skull hammering. Virdi argues that gene therapy and gene editing are just a new version of the same old idea, only with even more profound implications.

“Improvements in science don’t necessarily mean that we need to eliminate human variety, especially human conditions that are not life threatening,…