Alumnus featured on MIT website!

MENAR Fellowship Program alumnus Timothy Loh, now a second-year PhD student at MIT, was recently featured in a profile on MIT’s website. He is studying deafness, sign language, and technology in the Middle East. Timothy was a MENAR fellow at the Collateral Repair Project in Amman, Jordan in 2016-2017.

Read the article here:

Uncovering the role of technology and medicine in deaf and signing worlds
MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

“Last summer, when I was doing fieldwork, one of my deaf friends asked me straight up, ‘How does your work benefit the deaf community in Jordan?’ That’s a fair question. I told him I am still thinking about this. It’s an important question to answer well. How do anthropologists give back to the community that we’re learning from?

“I think for many anthropologists, we hope that our work can ‘speak truth to power,’ to resist and complicate simplistic and hegemonic narratives, like the idea that technology can provide technical solutions for political problems. I do hope that my research can eventually inform policymaking for people in the Middle East whose voices need to be heard.”