Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality

Data & Society

Meryl Alper- Mobile communication technologies are often hailed in the popular press and public policy as a means of “giving voice to the voiceless.” Behind the praise are determinist beliefs about technology as a gateway to opportunity, voice as a metaphor for agency and self-representation, and voicelessness as a stable and natural category. In this talk, based on her new book Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality (MIT Press, 2017), Meryl Alper offers a new angle on these established critiques through a qualitative study of individuals with significant communication disabilities who use mobile devices for synthetic speech output. Alper finds that despite widespread claims to empowerment, these tools are still subject to disempowering structural inequalities. Culture, laws, institutions, and even technology itself can reinforce disparities among those with disabilities across class, race, ethnicity, and gender. Alper argues that voice is an overused and imprecise metaphor in media and communication studies, one that abstracts, obscures, and oversimplifies the human experience of disability. She will discuss implications of her research for our rapidly changing media ecology and political environment, where the question is not only which voices get to speak, but also who is thought to have a voice to speak with in the first place.

Chapters

1. Digital youth with disabilities. The range of speech generating devices and apps. (00:00:00)

2. Working against the idea of “giving voice to the voiceless.” What is the precedent for this problematic framework of viewing disability. (00:06:49)

3. Theoretical perspectives from critical disability studies which frame Meryl’s research. Disability is profoundly rooted in cultural, social, political, and economic factors. (00:13:58)

4. Methods of research, and the lives of speech generating devices in school and the home. How people with disabilities are put into particularly precarious positions surrounding these “voice-giving” technologies. (00:22:38)

5. Implicit bias toward english speaking in these devices. The fear that these devices might exacerbate the difficulties people with disabilities face in dealing with law enforcement. The at times prohibitive cost of these devices. (00:29:07)

6. Listening to the voices in ProLoQuo. What do we do with the technologies that give voice to people but that can also put gaps between them? (00:37:23)

7. The politics of voice and arguing for the idea of keeping voices attached to people. (00:46:02)