Cochlear Implants, Curative Rhetoric, and Communication Choices

Koppaka V. Rao Memorial Lecture
Rachel Kolb, Ph.D., author of Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice

Rachel Kolb was born profoundly deaf in 1990, the same year that the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. She grew up with both American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken and written English, as well as the newfound accessibility measures that enabled her to thrive in school and other settings. But when she was twenty years old, she decided to get a cochlear implant (CI) in one ear. At the time, this felt like one of the most loaded — and indeed one of the most ambivalent — decisions of her life.

In this reflective talk, Kolb will give a personal account of her decision to get a CI, fleshing out how she reckoned with both medical and cultural frameworks of deafness, alongside the varied ways she’d already learned to think about language and human communication. Drawing from her new book Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice, she will introduce clinicians to some complications with curative rhetoric in the medical setting, including how the commonplace desire to “fix” disability can sometimes limit medical professionals’ understanding of individuals’ deeper perspectives and lived experiences. Finally, she will consider how her CI became another tool in her daily arsenal, alongside the many other communication choices that can empower effective interpersonal understanding, including in clinical contexts.
Provided by the University of Virginia School of Medicine and School of Nursing

Rachel Kolb is a writer whose work explores communication, language, and disability as central components of human experience. A graduate of Stanford University, she was the first signing deaf Rhodes scholar at Oxford before receiving her Ph.D. in English literature from Emory University and then completing a junior fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Her work has been published in The New York Times and The Atlantic, among other venues, and she is the author of the new memoir Articulate (Ecco, 2025).

Medical Center Hour is free of charge and open to the public. For more information, see Center for Health Humanities and Ethics: https://med.virginia.edu/biomedical-e...