Language in Medical Worlds: Hearing Technology for Deaf Jordanian Children

Bringing together medical and linguistic anthropology, I examine the provision of hearing technology, such as cochlear implants, to deaf Jordanian children, a project animated by an imperative to make deaf children speak. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork at a cochlear implantation initiative and an audiology department in Amman, I argue that this imperative must be understood in relation to anxieties about the status of Arabic in Jordan and the historical value of orality in the Middle East. This case shows that more attention must be paid to the role of language ideologies in co-constituting medical encounters between clinicians, parents, and patients.