Becoming Cyborg: On Deafness, New Materialism, and Pivoting a Research Agenda

I’ve been severely and profoundly deaf since a bout of spinal meningitis when I was two. For much of my life, this bodily aspect and its many dimensions were not particularly interesting to me. In fact, I thought it was the least interesting thing about me, as did my parents, and getting accustomed to wearing a hearing aid and working through years of speech therapy as a child were simply practical matters. We never used the word ‘disabled’ to describe me. I underwent a mainstream education, skipped a couple of grades, went to college early and then dropped out, worked in restaurants, temp jobs, and call centers, and eventually spent nearly a decade doing high-contact business development, mostly through hours of phone calls each day. As I pursued a bachelor’s degree at night, I realized that I much preferred the energy of campuses and classes to that of corporate life. Eventually, I decided to pivot and go to graduate school to pursue a master’s and, eventually, a doctorate in Rhetoric, Scientific, and Technical Communication.