Inventing Amplified Telephony: The Co-Creation of Aural Technology and Disability

Author(s):  
Coreen McGuire

Amplified telephony was introduced to the UK by the General Post Office in an attempt to provide ‘hard of hearing’ individuals access to telephone communications during the inter-war years. In defining deafness as an inability to engage with telephony, the Post Office used this technology to construct new thresholds of hearing loss. Through exploring the development of amplified telephones for ‘deaf subscribers’ I show how telephony was used as a tool in the categorisation of disability and how, in turn, telephone users modified such technology to fit their personal needs and identities. A growing number of histories of disability examine the multiple ways in which social contexts shape disability and ability. This analysis provides a new perspective on the fluid, technology influenced definitions of hearing and deafness. By conceptualising the amplified telephone as a prosthetic, this analysis uncovers some of the ways in which hearing and deafness were socially and technologically constructed in interwar Britain. Study of early twentieth century telephony redefines the relationship between technology, communications, and disability, broadening our historical understanding of deafness in particular.

1976 ◽  
Vol 129 (3) ◽  
pp. 216-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. F. Cooper

SummaryReview of the literature concerning the relationship between deafness and psychiatric disorder reveals differences in the pattern of illness depending on the severity of deafness and the age of onset. In particular, the prevalence of schizophrenia in the prelingually deaf is similar to that found in the normal population, whereas the hard of hearing are over-represented among samples of patients suffering from paranoid psychoses in later life.Possible modes of action of long-standing hearing loss in the aetiology of paranoid illnesses are considered: the psychological and social consequences of deafness, the possible contribution of sensory deprivation phenomena, and the interference of hearing loss in attention, perception and communication. Finally, possible future lines of research are suggested.


Author(s):  
Adam Evans

Since the Treaty and Acts of Union in 1707, Scotland has returned MPs to Westminster. Whilst dwarfed, at least demographically by its partner in that Union, England, Scotland has, on a number of occasions, punched above its weight at the Centre—most notably at either end of the twentieth century when Liberalism and then Labour dominated Scottish politics. This chapter examines the relationship of Scotland with the UK Parliament. It begins by placing this relationship in its historical context, before then turning to an audit of contemporary Scottish influence and representation at Westminster, post-devolution. This chapter does this by breaking down two of the main and interconnected dimensions of Scottish representation at Westminster: (1) Scottish parliamentarians and the Westminster party system; and (2) institutional representation within Parliament. This latter category includes both Scottish-specific institutional mechanisms, such as the Scottish Affairs Committee and the Scottish Grand Committee, and the broader Westminster apparatus that can be leveraged for influence, such as parliamentary question times.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobhan McAndrew ◽  
Paula Surridge ◽  
Neema Begum

The UK vote to leave the European Union in June 2016 surprised and confounded academics and commentators alike. Existing accounts have focused on anti-immigration attitudes, anti-establishment sentiment and on the ‘left behind’, as well as on national identity. This paper expands the range of possible explanations for the vote by considering a wider range of identity measures, including class and racial identities, and by considering in detail the role played by connectedness to others and to localities. We find evidence that racial identity was particularly important for White British voters, extending our understanding of the relationship between territorial identities, ethnicity and attitudes towards the European Union. Connectedness via networks also structures attitudes, with those with higher levels of and more diverse connections having more favourable attitudes towards the EU. Whilst these effects are smaller than those of education and age, they are nonetheless comparable with those of class and income, and suggest that we should be wary of accounts of attitudes towards the EU that fail to locate voters within their social contexts.


2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 825-844 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID SCOTT GEHRING

ABSTRACTResearch on the relationship between England and Protestant Germany during the sixteenth century has recently experienced a revival. A significant area of concentration for confessional interests among Lutherans a century ago, Anglo-German relations took a backseat in Reformation historiography during the twentieth century, but during the last decade or so a host of scholars in the UK, Germany, and USA have once again turned their attention to the topic. This review article surveys trends in scholarship on Reformation studies in both England and Germany before turning specifically to works considering instances of interaction, co-operation, and adaptation across the confessional and geographic divides. Gathering a considerable array of secondary materials, the article offers an overview of the merits and criticisms of previous analyses and concludes by pointing out a few areas for future inquiry.


Author(s):  
Brian Spooner

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the UK dispatched a number of envoys, agents and spies into the vast area between northern India and the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The information gathered by these adventurers provided the basis for British policy for the next hundred years, right down to the Great War of the twentieth century. Their publications have served as major sources of historical data, especially for Afghanistan, Iran and the area that later became Pakistan. But how their larger social context conditioned their work has not been examined sufficiently. In this chapter, I will focus on the adventures of Lieutenant Henry Pottinger, whose brief was one of the most challenging. However, he was well aware of being one of a number of Englishmen of different social classes who were doing similar things. What we learn about any one of them will shed additional light on the activities and significance of the work of the others, and in turn help us to understand the relationship between these countries and the West as it has evolved from the nineteenth century to the present day.


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-260
Author(s):  
Emily Ridge

Abstract In the epigraph to his 1939 novel Beware of Pity, Stefan Zweig distinguishes between a form of “unsentimental but creative” empathy and a mode of “weak-minded, sentimental pity” that serves only as a “way of defending yourself against someone else's pain.” Focusing on Beware of Pity as well as The Post Office Girl and Chess, this article interprets Zweig's epigraph as a commentary on narrative as well as interpersonal forms of engagement, centered upon his conception of the relationship between author/narrator and suffering protagonist. Drawing on the work of David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, it further posits “empathetic surveillance” as a figure through which to assess this relationship, because Zweig can frequently be found to experiment with narrative distance and observation where the scene of suffering is concerned. His late writing demonstrates an attempt to work through his own conflicting wartime experiences of fellow feeling, but it also offers a sustained reflection on the implications of a broader crisis in empathy on a narrative level around the Second World War. The article characterizes Zweig's particular approach to narrative empathy in terms of an “empathic realism,” which can be defined both against what Meghan Marie Hammond has recently called “empathic modernism” and in contradistinction to nineteenth-century “sympathetic realism.” Poised between pre- and postwar outlooks, his work provides valuable insights on the changing contours of empathetic authorship across the twentieth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (18) ◽  
pp. 5-13
Author(s):  
Daniel Edmonds ◽  
Evan Smith ◽  
Oleska Drachewych

The relationship between international communism, the national communist parties, and anti-colonial political movements is a subject which has drawn heated debates both amongst activists and historians. This professed anti-imperialism attracted new recruits in the non-European world, enabling the organisation to begin to break out of the European and North American strongholds which had been basis of prior social-democratic internationalism. Within the metropoles, racialised outsiders entered party ranks determined to turn the propounded anti-colonial ideals into a political reality. Connections were forged between labour movement activists and anti-colonialists, and between different colonial nationalist campaigners. This issue of Twentieth Century Communism features a selection of papers presented at a symposium at the University of Manchester, UK in November 2018. The symposium considered considered new trends in the history of communist anti-colonialism and internationalism in the twentieth century. 'Within and Against the Metropole' drew together scholars and activists from the US, Europe and the UK.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-186  
Author(s):  
Carl Humphries

This article explores the clarificatory potential of a specific way of approaching philosophical problems, centered on the analysis of the ways in which philosophers treat the relationship between ontological and historical forms of commitment. Its distinctive feature is a refusal to begin from any premises that might be considered “ontologistic” or “historicistic.” Instead, the relative status of the two forms of commitment is left open, to emerge in the light of more specific inquiries themselves. In this case the topic in question is furnished by an essay from the early twentieth century German philosopher Herman Schmalenbach, entitled “Der Genealogie der Einsamkeit” (somewhat problematically translated as “On Lonesomeness”). The aim is to show how the import of Schmalenbach’s historico-philosophical treatment of certain features arguably central to the spiritual practices and religious beliefs of Christianity can be more effectively grasped when approached in these terms. The first part provides an overview of the key points of Schmalenbach’s essay, while the second presents some conceptual-analytic considerations as a basis for exploring relations between ontological and historical forms of commitment as these figure in his text. Some possible broader implications for Christianity and its relationship to modern society are then also briefly sketched.  


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-52
Author(s):  
Pawel Aleksandrowicz

The study investigates the reading comprehension skill of d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) Poles in the context of media accessibility. Deriving from the assumption that spoken Polish typically acts as a second language for the DHH, the study employed state certificate exams designed for foreigners learning Polish as a second language. A reading comprehension test was composed on the basis of these exams, containing tasks at B1, B2 and C1 proficiency levels. It was administered to 126 participants: 87 d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) and 39 hearing persons acting as the control group. It was also accompanied by a demographic questionnaire to determine the relationship between the reading skill and such aspects as age, education, degree of hearing loss, onset of hearing loss, preferred means of communication (sign language, spoken Polish, both), declared proficiency in Polish and preferred media accessibility method (sign language interpretation, subtitling, either of the two).


Author(s):  
Susanne Bisgaard

As long as the sense of hearing remains intact, the individual can participate in the negotiation and production of social and cultural values in the contexts to which she or he ascribes a meaning. But what happens when the sounds are muffled? The handling of hearing loss is subject to substantial individual differences – some wish to participate in all social contexts, others wish only to uphold contact to specific segments of the lifeworld. The hard of hearing may be excluded from a number of contexts, but the hearing aid may be a help to retain a position. Some use them in all their waking hours, others only in specific contexts. The difference is due to physiological and technological circumstances, because no two hearing losses are perceived in the same way. Moreover, the technology of the hearing aid may help the user to hear better, but it does not restore natural hearing. Typically, the hard of hearing go through a process, in which the physical hearing loss is related to the lifeworld. In this process the individual moves from being a normal hearing person to being hard of hearing. Being hard of hearing differed for the informants from a wish to participate in social life to an utter loss of one’s functioning and a concern with bodily appearance.  


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