"Going Tactile is an ethnographic exploration of life in DeafBlind communities in the U.S. during a time when political efforts were shifting away from gaining access to visual worlds and toward the discovery of new, tactile worlds. In the years leading up to this moment, the goal was to obtain resources that could be used to pay for sighted interpreters. Unlike interpreters who translate from one language to another, these interpreters were trained to give DeafBlind people access to the immediate environment by describing it. In the early 2010s, DeafBlind leaders intervened, arguing that descriptions of the world are no substitute for the world itself. They advanced the radical claim that hearing and vision are not necessary for things like joining or leaving a conversation, observing others, or being with them in silence. They called their effort "the protactile movement". As this movement took root in practices and institutions, DeafBlind people who had once faced existential collapse due to excessivesocial constraints on touch, found themselves in an vivid, intelligible world, replete with possible paths forward. Drawing on 30 months of anthropological fieldwork with DeafBlind artists, intellectuals, political leaders, and community members involvedin the protactile movement, this book asks: When the world is collapsing around you, and existence is at stake, how can language be of use, where are its limits, and how can we understand the forms of meaning that lie beyond it?"--
In the 2010s, leaders of the DeafBlind community in Seattle 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, Anthropologist Terra Edwards draws on thirty months of ethnographic fieldwork with DeafBlind artists, intellectuals, political leaders, and community members, to show how autonomous spaces away from sighted norms were created and life was re-imagined. In doing so, she offers a new perspective on the nature of language, its limits, and what it means to find a new way of being in the world.
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" of the 1990s created new ways of communicating, interacting, and navigating through touch. Assessing the limits of language and representation, this book contextualizes linguistic and interactional work that has been conducted in the U.S. for scholars and students of Deaf studies, anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics.
