Praying for Rights: Cultivating Deaf Worldings in Urban India

This article ethnographically analyzes the emergence of deaf worlding in New Delhi, India centered around Christianity, deaf rights, and deaf sociality. Approaching disability through human rights frameworks involves the worlding of rights-focused subjectivities. However, disability as a social and moral category and experience is frequently routed through and exists alongside other domains in which rights may be of differential importance. Thus disability rights, especially as a global initiative, intermingles with other ways of being in and out of the world. The focus of human rights often has different bases and priorities than, for instance, religious worlds, which are often otherworlds or interworlds. This ethnography thus examines how deaf people cultivate selves, socialities, institutions, and goals that are interworldly. An analysis of how deaf people pray for rights foregrounds deaf and disability activism that is not solely located in a liberal international human rights regime and allows for other kinds of deaf/disability personhood and worldings. A focus on cultivation becomes a means to think about the interactive and processual emergence of interworldly orientations, institutions, and futures.