Going Tactile: Life at the Limits of Language

In the 1990s, leaders of the DeafBlind community in Seattle (people who started out as Deaf children, acquired American Sign Language, and eventually became blind) called into question the community’s dependence on sighted interpreters, and sought new ways of communicating, interacting, and navigating through touch. This effort became the ＂protactile movement,＂ and it spread quickly across the country. In Going Tactile, Terra Edwards explores life in DeafBlind communities in the U.S. through an ethnographic lens. Drawing on thirty months of anthropological fieldwork with DeafBlind artists, intellectuals, political leaders, and community members, the author shows how the protactile movement created autonomous spaces away from sighted norms. These spaces of communication call into question the nature of language and the relationship between being in, and representing, the world. Highlighting the possibility of life after collapse, Going Tactile assesses the limits of language and representation and, ultimately, what it means to find a new way of being in the world.

Terra Edwards is a linguistic anthropologist in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2014 from The University of California, Berkeley, and has held faculty positions in the department of Linguistics at Gallaudet University, and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Saint Louis University. Her research, rooted in long-standing collaborations with DeafBlind individuals and communities, has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and has been published in Anthropological Theory, Language, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language in Society, among other academic journals.