Acknowledgements Chapter One: Life at the Limits of Language Chapter Two: Creating DeafBlind Identity Chapter Three: The Collapse of the World Chapter Four: The Protactile Movement Chapter Five: Being for Speaking Chapter Six: The Laminated Environment Conclusions References Index

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.

"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

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.

Selling point: Takes an anthropological approach to the existential and environmental foundations of language for DeafBlind communities Selling point: Contextualizes linguistic and interactional work that has been conducted in the U.S. Selling point: Generates questions and potential research projects for DeafBlind communities abroad Selling point: Includes original historical information about the history of the Seattle DeafBlind community, shared through the experiences of DeafBlind people