Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication

In Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication, Joshua St. Pierre flips the script on communication disability, positioning the unruly, disabled speaker at the center of analysis to challenge the belief that more communication is unquestionably good. Working with Gilles Deleuze's suggestion that "[w]e don't suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we've nothing much to say," St. Pierre brings together the unlikely trio of the dysfluent speaker, the talking head, and the troll to show how speech is made cheap--and produced and repaired within human bodies--to meet the inhuman needs of capital. The book explores how technologies, like social media and the field of speech-language pathology, create smooth sites of contact that are exclusionary for disabled speakers and looks to the political possibilities of disabled voices to "de-face" the power of speech now entwined with capital.

Author: Joshua St Pierre
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 05/25/2022
Pages: 180
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.50d
ISBN13: 9780472055340
ISBN10: 0472055348
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | People with Disabilities
- Social Science | Media Studies
- Political Science | Political Process | Media & Internet

About the Author
Joshua St. Pierre is Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta.