Public lecture Deaf futurity

What is the lecture about?

How does being disabled change the way people view the world and the things they create? Tracing innovations by deaf people and questioning the marketing of hearing devices, Dr. Virdi offers a historical approach for rethinking the role of technology for disabled living. Through historical and contemporary perspectives, she invites alternative approaches for remaking crip worlds, one in which disabled people, and the disabled gaze, are centered first and foremost.

Accessibility!

The lecture will be translated simultaneous from spoken English to Dutch Sign Language and International Sign Language. Both translations will be available on campus and online.

Practical!

The lecture will take place in the auditorium of the Tweebronnen library in Leuven, but will also be streamed online.

If you want to attend on campus, please book your ticket by using the reservation button on this page.

If you want to attend online, please click on this link.

Who is Jaipreet Virdi?

Jaipreet Virdi is a scholar activist and Associate Professor in the Department of History at University of Delaware. Her first book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History raises pivotal questions about deafness in American society and the endless quest for a cure. Her writing has appeared in Slate, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Psyche, The Wellcome Collection, and the New Internationalist.

At the age of four, Jaipreet Virdi’s world went silent. A severe case of meningitis left her alive but deaf, suddenly treated differently by everyone. Her deafness downplayed by society and doctors, she struggled to “pass” as hearing for most of her life. Countless cures, treatments, and technologies led to dead ends. Never quite deaf enough for the Deaf community or quite hearing enough for the “normal” majority, Virdi was stuck in aural limbo for years. It wasn’t until her thirties, exasperated by problems with new digital hearing aids, that she began to actively assert her deafness and reexamine society’s—and her own—perception of life as a deaf person in America.

What is Virdi's book Hearing happiness about?

Through lyrical history and personal memoir, Hearing Happiness raises pivotal questions about deafness in American society and the endless quest for a cure. Taking us from the 1860s up to the present, Virdi combs archives and museums in order to understand the long history of curious cures: ear trumpets, violet ray apparatuses, vibrating massagers, electrotherapy machines, airplane diving, bloodletting, skull hammering, and many more. Hundreds of procedures and products have promised grand miracles but always failed to deliver a universal cure—a harmful legacy that is still present in contemporary biomedicine.

Weaving Virdi’s own experiences together with her exploration into the fascinating history of deafness cures, Hearing Happiness is a powerful story that America needs to hear.

The public lecture Deaf futurity is co-organized by the KU Leuven Centre for Health Humanities.