Make difference Deafness and video technology at work REBEKAH CUPITT Doctoral Thesis (No. 03, 2017) KTH Royal Institute of Technology Computer Science and Communication Media Technology and Interaction Design SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden ISBN 978-91-7729-137-4 TRITA-CSC-A-2017:03 ISSN 1653-5723 ISRN KTH/CSC/A--17/03-SE © Rebekah Cupitt, Stockholm 2017 Tryck: US-AB, Stockholm Cover image SVT offices @ Lugnet, Falun. The picture shows the personal fire alarms each deaf employee was supposed to put on as soon as they entered the building in case of fire. The alarms would vibrate if there was a fire to signal the need for evacuation. These alarms were cumbersome, uncomfortable, and one employee told me during an interview that it made them feel conspicuously disabled. The personal fire alarms are just one technology that disabled SVT Teckenspråk employees. Akademisk avhandling som med tillstånd av KTH i Stockholm framlägges till offentlig granskning för avläggande av filosofi doktorsexamen måndag den 16 januari kl. 13:00 i sal F3, KTH, Lindstedtsvägen 26, Stockholm. Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract iii Foreword v I INTRODUCTION The ‘house meeting’ 3 Living with the mess 7 The problem mess 11 The question 16 Outline 20 II THEORY The theoretical mélange 27 Practice theory 28 Performativity 30 Feminist theory 33 So far, so what 44 III METHODOLOGY ...about methodology 47 Politics and ethics 50 IV TECHNOLOGY Technology as technology 56 Language as technology 65 Interpreters as technology 66 Abandon ‘technology’? 67 V ORGANISATION Studying up the organisation 72 SVT:“... ett public service företag som gör tv om alla, för alla” 78 SVT Teckenspråk: in, of, and with SVT 91 VI MEETINGS What is a meeting? 96 Video meetings 100 Meetings at SVT Teckenspråk 109 VII VISUALITIES Ways of seeing 112 The circle 126 The beaver 129 The bag 131 A deaf visuality 135 VII HISTORIES Telling histories 139 The move 143 The first move < 2010 145 Waiting for the move, > 2010 153 Locale move and local ‘moves’, >2011 164 Writing histories 183 VIII VITALITIES 78 meetings and a workshop 190 Video meeting #68 192 Vital video meetings 219 IX SUBJECTIVITIES The lived experience of video meetings 222 Video meeting #74 225 Partial reconfigurations 250 X MATERIALITIES Materiality untangled 256 Video meeting #59 260 The material-semiotic labours of SVT Teckenspråk 268 Material-discursive goings on 271 Materiality enacted 279 Being in Video meeting #70 286 More than merely matter 290 XI ALTERITIES Co-creating difference 296 Video meeting #70 re-visited 301 Emerging difference 307 Co-opting difference 315 XII CONCLUSION Design provocations 324 List of references 333 | i Acknowledgements Thank-you first and foremost to the staff at SVT Teckenspråk and those who worked at SVT in Falun during 2010-2012 especially. Without your patience, openness, and engagement this thesis would never have been written. While this text is neither in Swedish nor Swedish Sign Language at the moment, I hope to remedy that in the near future. I would also like to acknowledge the generous funding I have received from FORTE (Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare), the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the extra support I got from the Mediated Communication Doctoral program during my time as a PhD student. It is also important that I thank all my colleagues at the Department of media technology and interaction design (MID) and CESC (Vinnova Centre for Sustainable Communication). Although everyone has been alongside me through the ups and downs, I would especially like to thank Henrik Artman, Miriam Börjesson-Rivera, Ylva Ferneaus, Christiane Grünloh, Jan Gulliksen, Anders Hedman, Greger Henrikson, Mattias Höjer, Filip Kis, Malin Picha-Edwardson, Mario Romero, Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander, Cecilia Teljas, Åke Walldius, and Henrik Åhman for their support and comments. Special thanks to Erik Fransén and to the administrative staff at the School of Communication and Computer Science who have helped me deal with the practical aspects of doing a PhD - all while taking a genuine interest in my research. Thank-you also to those faculty and doctoral students at Stockholm University’s Department of Social Anthropology who have always been ready to discuss my research, offer insightful tips, and welcome me back ‘home’. Most particularly, thank-you Hege Høyer Leivestad, Christina Garsten, Mark Graham, Anette Nyqvist, Paula Uimonen, and Helena Wulff. A less formal but equally heartfelt shout-out goes to all my Tweeps - every single one has helped pull me through the hard times - even those who never followed me back. All of you have been awesome companions - there are too many to mention you all (700+), but special thanks to @nickseaver and @wishcrys who keep me inspired and motivated with their fantastic tweets and who have become research-buddies IRL. In addition I am more than grateful for the enormous inspiration and feedback I gained by presenting my research at international conferences ii | such as 4S, AAA, AAS, EASST, EASA as well as the occasional workshop and roundtable. I would like to thank those scholars who have been open to my research, eager to confer, and ready to help me untangle the complexities that have emerged. Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, Weibe Bijker, Tom Blakely, Marisa Cohn, Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, Patricia G. Lange, Jonathan P. Marshall, Stephen Molldrem, Alex Taylor, Mithali Thakor, Sharon Traweek, and Anita Say Chan - your comments have been instrumental in how my research has taken form. I would also like to remember David Hakken who’s pioneering research on technology, culture, and work has paved the way for studies such as mine. I especially thank the examination committee - Karen Nakamura, Laura Forlano, Mathias Broth, Laura Watts and Sabine Höhler - for their patience and engagement with my research. I could not have hoped for a more perfect constellation of scholars to assess my research as it has manifest in this thesis. Most of all I would like to thank my supervisors - Per-Anders Forstorp, Ann Lantz, and Minna Räsänen - for all the time and effort they have put into guiding me through my studies as a doctoral student. Your patience, interest, and expertise has been invaluable. I hope I have learnt everything you tried to teach me. | iii Abstract Video meetings are a regular part of work at Swedish television’s editorial for programming in Swedish Sign Language (SVT Teckenspråk). In the process of creating television programming in Swedish Sign Language, SVT employees communicate with and through technologies. This ethnographic exploration of video meetings at SVT Teckenspråk presents how deafness is reconfigured between hearing, interpreters, and video meeting technology within the context of a public service organisation. Concepts such as technology, meetings, organisations, and visuality are re-formulated from within the context of SVT Teckenspråk and interpreted using feminist and queer theory frameworks. These re-examined concepts are embedded in the history of SVT Teckenspråk and presented as part of the everyday way of holding video meetings. Technologies and people become intertwined and co-constitutive as moments of video meetings are subsequently understood not as human-technology ‘interactions’ but as intra-actions. Using empirical examples of video meetings collected during fieldwork, this thesis evinces how the materialities of video meeting technology relate to the ways in which deafness is or is not enacted, embodied, and co- constituted. Deafness is accordingly framed not as disability, but as a way of being - one that is founded on a different language, culture, and way of seeing. This emically-derived notion of being deaf impacts understandings and acts of video meetings at SVT Teckenspråk. Yet it is through people’s material intra-actions with technologies that notions of deafness emerge which run counter to ways of being deaf which SVT Teckenspråk employees’ (hearing and deaf alike) work hard to establish. Once technologies and the meanings co-created through people’s intra-actions with them are made visible, these same technologies disable rather than enable; making difference rather than making a difference. Keywords deaf culture, technology, intra-actions, video meetings, materiality visuality, alterity iv | Sammanfattning Videomöten är en del av vardagsarbetet på SVT Teckenspråk där anställda kommunicerar via och med hjälp av teknologier i skapandet av television på teckenspråk. Denna etnografiska utforskning omkring videomöten på SVT Teckenspråk presenterar hur dövhet omkonfigureras i en sammanvävning mellan hörande, tolkar, samt videomötesteknik inom en public service organisation. Begrepp som teknologi, möten, organisationer, samt visualitet omformuleras med SVT Teckenspråk som sammanhang och tolkas sedan med hjälp av feministiska och queer teoretiska ramverk. Dessa begrepp analyseras ur ett historiskt perspektiv inom SVT Teckenspråk samt omanalyseras som en vardaglig del av videomöten. Teknologi och människa sammanvävs och omformar varandra i videomöteshändelser vilka därefter uppfattas som intra-aktioner snarare än människa-dator interaktioner. Genom empiriska uppslag på videomöten uppsamlade under fältarbete påvisar denna avhandling hur videomötesteknik och dess materialitet relaterar till de sätt som dövhet kan utövas, uttryckas, samt uppformas. Dövhet uppfattas som ett sätt att vara istället för som ett funktionshinder. Ett sätt som bygger på ett unikt språk, kultur, samt världssyn. Detta är SVT Teckenspråk anställdas