Becoming Cyborg: On Deafness, New Materialism, and Pivoting a Research Agenda
Krista Kennedy | Syracuse University
ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7437-8717
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.71106/MZKC8891
Publication: Volume 6 Issue 4
Excerpt | 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.
Keywords | d/Deafness, disability, technology, artificial intelligence, hearing aids, algorithmic data collection, consent, cyborg, tryborg, new materialism
Krista Kennedy (krista01@syr.edu) is Associate Professor of Writing & Rhetoric, Director of Graduate Studies for the Composition & Cultural Rhetorics doctoral program, and a Senior Research Fellow in the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on the ways that humans work closely with technologies and the rhetorical implications of policies and laws that shape that work. Her experience as a deaf academic informs her current project, which examines intersections of d/Deafness, artificial intelligence, and ethics of medical data collection.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Kennedy, Krista. “Becoming Cyborg: On Deafness, New Materialism, and Pivoting a Research Agenda.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, 16 Jun. 2025, pp. 1.52–1.61, https://doi.org/10.71106/MZKC8891
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