Going Tactile

Book excerpt: 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.