FROM HOPING TO EXPECTING: Cochlear Implantation and Habilitation in India

While scholars have attended to disability as a new normal that is increasingly present as a category and experience in public spheres, this essay argues that technologies such as cochlear implants and accompanying therapeutics make it possible for children to "become normal." Parents come to expect, rather than hope, that interventions will work. An analysis of habilitating children with cochlear implants in India-and habilitation as a process and practice in general-foregrounds the ways that potentiality attaches to certain kinds of devices, therapeutic methods, and people because of the presumed existence of malleability. Habilitation in the case of cochlear implants means developing a hearing brain and becoming a listening and speaking person. Potentiality and ideal habilitative trajectories wane with age and families must negotiate expectations in relation to sharply etched ideas of what is normal. This essay stresses that just as scholars have critically attended to rehabilitation, habilitation too is an important process of activating what is perceived to be latent and has future-oriented stakes. [habilitation; rehabilitation; deafness; potentiality; cochlear implants; India]