Tech, Talk, and Touch: Making Sense of Language

This talk, drawing on a multi-year qualitative study, poses the question: What constitutes language? In order to respond to this, the investigation analyzes videotaped participant observations, interviews, and artifacts collected in the United States and India, focusing on familial exchanges. These involve my 'nonverbal' daughter with Rett syndrome, who uses an eye-tracking Augmentative and Alternative Communication device to speak, and my parents, both of whom face sensory differences due to blindness or hearing impairment. The analysis highlights the impact of sensory shifts, linguistic complexities, and cultural identities on meaning-making. These multi-sensory interactions disrupt conventional paradigms of language, showing how technology, cultural practices, and family dynamics establish language as a dynamic, adaptive process rooted in sensory perception. During both virtual and in-person interactions, the family navigates linguistic differences and barriers through careful mediation, laughter, misunderstandings, and love. Ultimately, this study reveals the adaptability of language that transcends sensory boundaries, providing a broader understanding by highlighting the flexibility, complexity, and wholeness of 'disabled' human interaction.

• When: June 3, at 11.30 - 1.00 p.m. 
• Where: room 2.130

Usree Bhattacharya is Associate Professor in the Language and Literacy Education Department, College of Education, University of Georgia, USA. She received her PhD in Education from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. Her research is inspired by questions of diversity, equity, and access in multilingual educational contexts. A primary aim of her work is to illuminate the role of discourses, ideologies, and everyday practices in the production and reproduction of hierarchical relations within educational systems. Motivated by her daughter Kalika’s diagnosis of Rett Syndrome in 2018, she has been investigating language and literacy socialization within this context.