Bionic Ears: Cochlear Implants and the Future of Assistive Technology
Lindsey Dolich Felt, PhD
Stanford University – Program in Writing and Rhetoric
Abstract: "In this talk, I will share my personal experience as a user with cochlear implants, and discuss the history and future of this device's development. Introducing historian of science and technology Mara Mills' term "bionic rhetoric," I will explain how the cochlear implant negotiates two different strains of thinking in assistive technology design: normalization and enhancement. My talk will conclude with a discussion of how this rhetoric gets metabolized in literary and popular discourse, and how these narratives illuminate how people with disabilities use – and even hack – their assistive technologies."
Biosketch: Lindsey Dolich Felt is a lecturer in #NoBodyIsDisposable: The Rhetoric of Disability and The Rhetoric of Nonverbal Communication at Stanford University. She received her PhD in English from Stanford University in 2016, and holds a BA from Haverford College. Before coming to Stanford, she worked as a journalist for ESPN the Magazine and ESPN.com.
Her research interests include contemporary American literature, media culture, science fiction, science and technology studies, and disability studies. She is currently researching how disabled bodies crucially shaped conceptions of electronic communication in the post-WWII era, and has written articles on female hackers in Cyberpunk fiction, and the little known history of the first cybernetic limb and its influence on communication engineering in the early Cold War era.
Her course, "Unruly Bodies: Gesturing Toward a New Rhetorics of Body Language" explores how advances in science, technology, medicine, and culture have transformed our understanding of disability, normalcy, and health.
Perspectives in Assistive Technology Course Website
Classroom Loczation & Accessibility Information