Disability, Technology and Politics: The entangled experience of being hard of hearing.

Abstract

About 10 % of a population have a hearing loss. Combining analytical resources from two interdisciplinary field – Science and Technology Studies and Disability Studies - this thesis investigates the complex interplay between people, technologies and material surroundings. The aim is to learn about how hearing disability becomes ordered in policy making, audiological practice, and everyday life. Disability has traditionally been treated as a physical defect, a problem that can be compensated for utilizing medicine and assistive technologies. Over the last decades, disability policy has undergone a discursive shift. Today, disability is conceptualized as a natural part of societal diversity. Thus, rather than normalizing the disabled individual, society should enable the full inclusion and participation of disabled people in societal life. But how to realize the vision of the universal society? How to translate social rights into empowering medical consultation, enabling technical aids, including material surroundings, and respectful social relations among the people that live and work with hearing disability? Following policy to practice; hearing aids from design to use, and hard of hearing people from the audiological clinic and home, this investigates the transition from disability policy to practice. The result is a comparative, qualitative study of hearing loss in Norway and the Netherlands.