Pandemic mutilated pedagogy: Teaching "in there" without my hearing body

Although students with disabilities have generally been identified as a vulnerable group during the pandemic, the specific experiences of those with impaired hearing have not yet gained attention within the debates and literature on online teaching. Since the same condition holds for academic teachers, I will in this essay contribute an original and critical perspective by sharing my own story. Embraced by the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the reader will be invited into my world of hearing differently, and be able to see what this means when teaching online. Through significant embodied experiences of having been born with impaired hearing, and concrete situations from my own online teaching, I reveal how academia is normatively structured around people with normal hearing, and how this norm has become even more strengthened during the pandemic. Against this background, my essay ends with suggesting a more inclusive “new normal” than is currently practiced and portrayed in the post-pandemic future.