Going Tactile

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.

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.