Going Tactile

"Going Tactile invites us to explore the transformative world of the protactile movement. Terra Edwards illuminates the profound ways Deaf Blind individuals navigate life beyond sight and sound with rigor and compassion. Going Tactile redefines language, identity, and community, a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic anthropology." -- Miyako Inoue, Associate Professor of Anthropology and, by courtesy, of Linguistics, Stanford University "What is it like to live at the limits of language? And where does one go to ground a politics after the world has collapsed? In Going Tactile, Terra Edwards tracks the origins of the Protactile Movement and the emergence of DeafBlind Identity. Working closely with brilliant activists and theorists in the DeafBlind community, and building on almost two decades of ethnographic fieldwork and linguistic analysis, she shows how DeafBlind people established autonomous spaces away from sighted norms and, in those spaces, 'willed an entire world into being'. In this superb study, Edwards ultimately reframes the relation between language and thought, by focusing on residence in the world as opposed to representations of the world. She thereby inaugurates a paradigm that she calls, Being for Speaking." -- Paul Kockelman, Department of Anthropology, Yale University "The author's discussion of how language is (in)effectively used as a means of representing and navigating the world-and methods to improve such communication-is one of the book's greatest strengths." -- H. Caldwell, CHOICE