"This chapter is about the early history of the protactile movement in the 2010s in Seattle, Washington. Although there are broader historical frames that must be taken into account (Chapter 2), the inception of the movement can be located between 2006 and 2008 among the staff of the DeafBlind Service Center (DBSC), and in particular among three DeafBlind staff members, whom I call Adrijana, Lee, and Jodi. Recall that in the decades leading up to this moment, two primary ways of being DeafBlind had crystalized. There were “tactile” people who perceived ASL through touch, and there were “tunnel-vision” people, who perceived ASL through a receding tunnel of vision. Adrijana was the first DeafBlind director of DBSC, but beyond this she was a tactile person. Until this moment, those in leadership positions were either sighted or were able to effectively approximate sighted behaviors. It was rare for a tactile person to be in a position of authority.

When Adrijana became the director of DBSC, she explicitly sought to upend this authority structure. She began by uniting tactile and tunnel-vision people to form one coherent community, and turning DeafBlind people into the experts on their own ways of life and forms of communication. Externally, this involved negotiating “duplicate services” with neighboring organizations. If sighted people were teaching a skill such as “tactile communication” at another organization, Adrijana would encourage people to come to DBSC instead and learn those same skills from a DeafBlind teacher. Internally, this involved building capacity among the DBSC staff to create tactile environments and participate in them consistently. While Adirjana tried many strategies—offering incentives, issuing directives, and simply explaining her goal and asking her staff to opt in, she ultimately found that replacing nearly all of DBSC’s staff members was the only way forward. She recalled:
 
"For about two years, there was a lot of instability in the organization. I really wanted to have the right people in there doing a good job because DBSC is an organization that is there for DeafBlind people, and they had to feel comfortable coming in and getting what they needed."

However, it was not at all self-evident how to make DBSC a comfortable and appealing place for DeafBlind people. Experimentation would be required. Adrijana knew that breaking with previously established norms and experimenting with new ways of interacting and communicating would require at least one collaborator with some specific characteristics. They had to be a rule- breaker more than a rule-follower. They had to be critical, but also creative. They had to be persuasive and, crucially, they had to be tactile. Lee, who had just moved to Seattle a few years after Adrijana, fit these criteria to a tee, and once she was hired onto DBSC’s staff, she became the key collaborator Adrijana needed.

Adrijana and Lee knew that they wanted to change DBSC in some fun- damental ways. Though there were many problem areas, they started with DBSC’s public image, as compared with other agencies and organizations in Seattle. In particular, they focused on a local non-profit that served Deaf victims of domestic violence and sexual assault called the Abused Deaf Women’s Advocacy Service, or “ADWAS.” Adrijana explained:
 
"[ADWAS] is such a popular organization because they’re attractive to people. […] They’re an organization of Deaf women, and it is truly a Deaf environment. They don’t have phones, they have TTYs (or they did when they started up). Their board is required to know ASL. The Lighthouse was attractive to people because of [their social and community programs]. But where did DBSC fit in? What was so great about DBSC? That was when the notion of “protactile” came up. It started out really vague and narrow. It didn’t mean “touch.” It meant, more narrowly, communicating through touch. The point was just to change people’s attitudes about tactile communication, as a modality, to say there’s nothing wrong with it."
 
Hearing people were actively encouraged to contribute to ADWAS as volunteers, board members, fundraisers, and so on, as long as they adapted to Deaf norms and did not expect Deaf people to adapt to their norms, and this commitment was built into the structure of the organization, concretely speaking. There were no voice telephones in use, no sound-based door bells, and no furniture that blocked visual communication.
Upon entering, one would encounter conversations unfolding in ASL, not a hearing receptionist talking on the phone. The feeling was, as Adrijana noted, this is a place where Deaf people can come in, feel comfortable, and get what they need. A small change, such as an English-speaking receptionist at the front desk, would have undermined efforts to make the organization welcoming and instead might have turned it into a place where Deaf people were merely accommodated. ADWAS had been successful because of the fact that they were a Deaf organization that served Deaf people according to Deaf norms. This extended beyond direct services. For example, their fundraising events took on a life of their own as vibrant sites of Deaf sociality in Seattle. Talk of a more inviting environment for DeafBlind people came about with a model like this in mind, but what would the DeafBlind version be, and what obstacles would need to be overcome to make it a reality?

4.1       “Everything We Touched Froze”
A meeting of staff, board members, and some community members was called early on in Adrijana’s tenure to talk about priorities for DBSC’s future. In this meeting, “protactile” started out as a slogan that was used to sell DBSC, but at the same time the more substantive idea of a “DeafBlind Friendly Zone” was raised. Adrijana explains:
 
"We started using the words, but we didn’t really know what they meant. What does it mean to have a DeafBlind friendly zone? Well, tactile signing was important, and we just started thinking about things like that, which led to more and more discussion, and over time it kept changing. For example, we started talking about why it was that if two people were talking to each other, and you walked up and put your hands on one of their hands, they would stop talking. Why not continue, so we can listen for a while? We wanted people to get rid of those habits that made it hard for DeafBlind people to move around a room, observing what was going on tactually."
 
Although it wasn’t clear yet what practices might be considered DeafBlind friendly, there were some things that clearly weren’t, such as this habit people had of pausing or “freezing” when a DeafBlind person touched them. DBSC’s conference rooms, hallways, and offices were populated by people who were frozen, suspended in mid-air. Adrijana said it had an eerie effect. Sometimes, at lunch, for example, she would take a bite and then reach out to feel the other person’s hand or arms to see if they were still eating or not. If they weren’t eating, she might say something to them. If they were, she might want to feel their hands take the food to their mouths, or maybe their jaw chewing, but every time she put her hands on someone, they would pause, awkwardly, until she removed her hand. If people were standing around talking in the conference room before a meeting, she would approach them, put her hands on one of them, and hope that they would continue signing, so she could tell what they were talking about. Invariably, though, the conversation would stop. Either they would stop moving, as if they didn’t know what to do, or they would ask her what she wanted. How was she to know what she wanted if she didn’t know what possibilities for wanting there were? How was she supposed to know what possibilities there were, if she couldn’t observe activity in her environment?
In the past, this kind of observation was always accomplished with a sighted interpreter, but interpreters were in short supply, and Adrijana often went without one. Furthermore, she didn’t think tactile observation was implausible in such situations, but in the larger community frames for interpreting action like this were missing, so when it was done it was confusing, irritating, or on occasion even interpreted as inappropriately sexual. For Adrijana and several of her friends and colleagues, there was a disconnect. In 2006, I conducted two months of fieldwork, and during that time, I lived with Adrijana and her Deaf, sighted husband. They and several of their friends (both sighted and DeafBlind) had intuitively started “observing” the activity around them through touch.

In 2008, I also lived with Adrijana and her husband for about four months while working part-time at DBSC and continuing fieldwork. During that time, I was integrated into a group of friends and colleagues who were routinely exposed to these practices. As a result, we no longer froze on contact, and, without necessarily noticing, our boundaries around touch had been revised. For example, when Adrijana and I would go out together, she would often start the encounter by touching my feet, feeling the type and texture of shoes I was wearing. She would feel for the style of pants at the ankle and then trace the fabric up the shin to the knee. From there, she would skip to the belt and feel for the thickness and the texture. Then she would move to the neck- line of the shirt and do a quick scan of the sleeves before feeling the style and state of the hair—Still wet? Ponytail? Straightened? Curly? All the while, she would be pulling in gulps of air through her nose, clearly gathering olfactory details as well. Finally, I would add any information that she wasn’t likely to discover; for example, if we were wearing the same color, I might mention that. We usually disagreed about something. Adrijana thought our shoes were the same, and I didn’t. Or she would (in good humor) accuse me of stealing her style, and I would try to defend myself. These arguments often ended with her telling me to feel rather than look at the item under dispute and once I had done that, I would often concede. Visually there were differences, but through touch the similarities stood out instead.
Although we were close friends and roommates, this kind of thing felt no more intimate than a friend commenting on your clothes when they see you: “I like your shirt.” Or: “Look! We’re matching!” Outside of our small group of friends, however, it was clearly counter to the norm. In the broader community, people were still suspended in mid-air and lacking particularity. Attempts to fill in the details were continually thwarted. When Adrijana became the director of DBSC, the staff there was no exception:
 
"Everyone was like that. Especially Deaf employees. If you came up and put your hands on them, they would either freeze or say “Hold on, I’m talking to someone.” Or, “I’ll be done in a sec.”"
 
In the past, Adrijana couldn’t always prevent this sort of response, but now that she was the director of DBSC changes like this were within the scope of her job responsibilities. It wasn’t just for her. She wanted DeafBlind people to have a sense of ownership and belonging in this organization that was established specifically for them.
 
4.2       “The Family Was Almost Dead”
Sitting in her office at DBSC, walking around the halls, entering into the conference room, Adrijana was struck, first and foremost, by the silence and utter lack of feeling. As Adrijana put it:
 
"The family was almost dead. It was like the Adams family. No character, no spirit, no nothing. It was just a vacant, bureaucratic feeling."
 
For the sighted people who worked there, Adrijana’s sense of DBSC as lifeless and vacant might have seemed odd or unexpected. However, when sensory orientation shifts slowly, as it had over the years for Adrijana, what counts as self-evident shifts with it. For example, in the summer of 2006, I did a lot of people-watching with Helen. We went to places like the farmer’s market, restaurants, the dog park, and I passed along “snap-shots” of what I saw, adjusting the focus of description as instructed. On one of these excursions, we were wandering around in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, and we stumbled into an art opening. The following is taken from my field notes written afterward:
 
"I started with the hammers. Helen said not to bother, she wanted the feet. So we found a corner and started with the feet, which required attention to the legs.

80 Going Tactile
 
“The toe is planted and the heel is swiveling right to left and back again” I say. “I don’t understand, show me,” Helen says.
 
So I plant my toes and swivel my right foot. Helen pats down my leg, while I continue. She makes it down to the toes and back up again, and then says she gets it. She imitates me and asks if that’s it. I confirm.
 
“Woman or man?” she asks. “Woman.”
“Is she talking to a woman or a man?” “Man.”
“Next.”
 
It turns out that that woman was not the only woman talking to a man and swiveling one of her feet back and forth, pivoting on the toes. There were others. Helen notes that when a woman flirts, she is likely to engage in this particular movement of the foot. I move to the right. Two men are next to a very large sculpture of gears. They are facing each other, feet anchored:
 
“They’re not moving their feet at all?” Helen asks. “Nope.”
“Men or women?” “Men.”
“What about the rest of their bodies? What are they doing?”
“Their hands are in their pockets, their heads are nodding, almost impercep- tibly, and they’re looking at the floor. Every once in a while, they look at each other and then quickly back to the floor,” I say.
“They’re looking at the floor and their hands are in their pockets?” Helen asks. “Yep.”
 
As we made our way around the room, it became clear that these men were not the only ones with their hands in their pockets. There were others. In fact this was almost an entirely generalizable feature of the room. It was a room in which hands were pocketed:
 
“Feet anchored, eyes averted, hands in pockets.”
“Left foot anchored, right foot swiveling, hands in pockets.”"
 
And it goes on like this, until Helen becomes concerned. She says, “What are they doing with their hands in their pockets? Isn’t this a party?” She hadn’t remembered that hearing people stand around with their hands in their pockets, since they’ve got their mouths and their eyes for talking and seeing and such. She said she must have known that before she was blind. We went over the room again, scouring for hands caught mid-activity, and there were almost no cases to report. She accused them of being devoid of feeling. She accused them of being cold. But after thinking about it longer, she said, “Those poor people! They have too many limbs! They don’t know what to do with them!”
 
For me, the pocketed hands, the averted eyes, and the swiveling feet all faded into the background as expectable features of an awkward social event. Helen, on the other hand, had been relying on interpreters to read social scenes for years. Slowly, their descriptions diverged from her direct encounters with the world.

When interpreters used words and phrases like “party” and “art opening,” as I did, those words were meant to refer to a setting with particular char- acteristics. For me, these words conjured certain kinds of people, behaviors, objects, and activities. Meanwhile, Helen’s environment was shifting beneath the words. While interpreters went on describing objects, scenes, and encoun- ters in a way that conjured the environment as they experienced it, she was filling in the details in ways they couldn’t have imagined. Insofar as high- level descriptions like “party” stood alone, no conflict arose. However, when the description operated a few notches down, to include more specific and concrete details, connections between the world and the descriptions of the world became glaringly problematic.

This gap between being in and talking about a place is an effect of the social, political, and historical paths taken by the Seattle DeafBlind community in the decades prior. When the community began to grow in the 1980s, the response was not to seek out affordances in the environment for direct, tactile communication, but rather to establish a DeafBlind identity, on the basis of which resources could be obtained from state government to pay for sighted interpreters (Chapter 2). In other words, the community started not with affordances, but with identity.

In the framework developed in this book, “affordance” and “identity” are located on opposite ends of a uni-directional process (Chapter 3). This is the idea: The world contains instruments, which we grasp in terms of their affordances for action. In performing actions habitually, we take on roles, and in routinely taking on roles, we have an identity. Represented schematically:

affordance → instrument → action → role → identity.
 
This process yields a way of residing in the world and is distinct from but related to ways of representing the world. While “the representational whole” has constituents of its own (Kockelman 2006b: 76), coherence between the two is presumed such that each is a really just a different “slice” of the same thing (Kockelman 2006a: 20). This coherence did not hold for Helen and me because at that point, the Seattle DeafBlind community was proceeding backwards through the constituents of the residential whole. As a result, there was no shared way of interpreting affordances in the environment, and without that, the most ordinary scenes became shocking, alarming, and confounding.

For example, in an interview, Lee explained that sighted people living in Seattle are familiar with downtown hotels. They expect to find automatic, sliding glass doors at the entrance. They anticipate the slightly squishy floor mat as they pass through the threshold. If they are holding a paper coffee cup, only a half-glance will be necessary to confirm the existence of a cylindrical silver trash can into which they can dispose of their cup. “It’s always the same!” Lee said. However, she explained that DeafBlind people have, until recently, relied on sighted interpreters to navigate public spaces, preventing them from tracking those connections. As a result, Lee says, scenes like the following are likely to unfold:
 
"A DeafBlind person walks into a [hotel], and runs into the garbage can turning the corner. They look shocked and tell the person they’re with that the placement of the trash can is not safe!"
 
Outbursts like this strike others as unwarranted, since from a sighted per- spective, the placement of the trash can is expectable. Lee pointed out that a DeafBlind person using a cane and paying attention to their surroundings without passing through someone else’s visual perspective would notice regularities like this as well. But they didn’t, and this made it seem like they were out of touch with reality.

I lived in Seattle and was involved in the DeafBlind community as an interpreter and in other capacities for seven years before I went to graduate school. During that time, I had witnessed many events like the one Lee described. For example, one day, I entered a coffee shop with a DeafBlind man. I told him there were several people in line ahead of us. He responded by repeatedly adjusting his footing, saying “Sorry. Sorry.” He clenched his fists and cringed, as if bracing for a collision. Or I would say something banal about what I was looking at, and they would yell, “I’m sorry!” “I didn’t know!” or “I’m blind!” These events always seemed quirky to me. However, looking back now, I see them as signs that ASL had too many demands placed on it, and its capacity to convey even the most basic facts about the environment was breaking down. The statement, “There are several people in line ahead of us,” could mean many things. It could mean, “You just cut in line. You’re being rude.” It could mean, “This looks like it’s going to take no time at all.” Or it could mean, “It looks like we might be here a while.” Each one of these interpretations would be reasonable under different circumstances, insofar as those circumstances were self-evident to us. At the time, though, unexpected responses to information like those I described above accrued to individual DeafBlind people (not their relation to the environment). They were “odd” or “eccentric.” People would sometimes recall the way they “used to be” and wonder aloud about their “decline.” At some level, then, these problems were being attributed to the failures of the individual.

In the years leading up to those exchanges, efforts to carve out a space for DeafBlind people started with established socio-political structures. Within those structures, a legible identity was established, and on that basis, state and local resources were tapped. However, operating within those structures tended to reinforce what was appropriate for sighted people, not what was effective for DeafBlind people, and being in the world became increasingly abstract (Chapter 3). Leaders of the protactile movement went a different way. Instead of finding ways to approximate sighted experiences, or access sighted environments, they started instead by relinquishing attachments to visual ways of being in the world, and relaxing normative constraints on touch.

​The staff at DBSC included three tactile DeafBlind people: Adrijana, Jodi, and Lee. Having three tactile DeafBlind staff members was unprecedented and there were no communication conventions in place for three-way tactile communication. In the past, if there were more than two DeafBlind people present, interpreters would be hired to mediate. In an interview in 2010, Adrijana explained:
 
"If Jodi and I were talking and Lee wanted to join, we had to figure that out. It wasn’t obvious to us at first, but we tried to follow our intuitions and find a way to communicate between the three of us. […] We weren’t really reflective about it. We just kind of did what worked, which was signing with two hands. Then when sighted people would join us, they would look confused—like how am I supposed to communicate with both of you at once? And we would tell them to sign with two hands. We didn’t do that if we had to have a meeting for an hour. We did that for short meetings—10 minutes here, 10 minutes there. I didn’t want to explain things to one staff person, and then repeat myself with the second person. That would eat up too much time. So it was a good way of efficiently conveying a short message."
 
When Adrijana says “signing with two hands,” she is talking about an inno- vative way of using the two hands that differed from the way they are used in ASL. In ASL, the dominant hand of the signer produces certain aspects of a signed expression, while the non-dominant hand is there in a “support” role. In the interactions Adrijana described, both hands were playing the role of the dominant hand (see Edwards 2014: 192–222 for a detailed analysis of this phenomenon). These practices quickly became naturalized among the staff at DBSC. So much so, that they were surprised when others found them novel:
 
"It became so normal for me in such a short period of time that I didn’t think about it. But when people saw it, they would respond—like “Wow! That’s so cool!” And I remember saying, “Well, they do that at the Lighthouse, too,” and being told that they didn’t do anything like that there. That was a big insight for me […]. I didn’t even realize that that was the case until about a year later. I didn’t come to the realization that there was a discrepancy in how communication was happening inside DBSC and outside. It had all happened so naturally that we didn’t think about each little thing we did. No one really talked about it much. It was just an ongoing negotiation and people were expected to do what it took to make themselves understood and understand other people."
 
From 2006 to 2007, communication within DBSC was already moving away from reliance on interpreters and toward direct communication between DeafBlind people. Conventions for communicating with sighted people that included more tactile practices were also emerging. This shift eased financial and scheduling strains. DBSC had very limited funds and interpreters were expensive. The scheduling process itself was time consuming as well, and in order to get the right interpreters they had to be booked far in advance. All of those problems grew more severe as the interpreter shortage worsened. As Adrijana explained, there were often situations where an impromptu meeting was needed that required the presence of more than one DeafBlind staff member and using interpreters was not feasible. In addition, Adrijana noted that people didn’t want to include DeafBlind people in their organi- zations or events because paying for interpreters for them was so expensive. Therefore, she said, “changing our communication practices could help solve that problem in addition to the day-to-day logistical problem of wanting to have short, spontaneous meetings.”
When internal dynamics started changing for the better, there was friction with people from outside the organization who came to DBSC regularly and hadn’t been privy to the changes. That friction, Adrijana said, “made the staff more insistent and gave them the inspiration to get serious about establishing a DeafBlind friendly zone.” A certain repertoire of DeafBlind friendly communicative practices had become naturalized within DBSC, and their naturalization made it difficult to describe them explicitly. As Adrijana says below, even if outsiders wanted to learn (which was not often the case in the beginning), naturalization was a barrier to teaching them:
 
"At first, I thought that communicating in a DeafBlind friendly way was common sensical, or at least easy to learn. But I realized that people don’t like change. These were all big insights for me and I realized that I had to be more patient, take things in baby steps, approach people more gently. We had to ask people nicely. We didn’t want to post big threatening signs [. . .], so I decided we would just have to go with the flow more, and be patient about change. That process took about two years— from 2006 to 2008."
 
By the end of 2008, the internal dynamics of DBSC were greatly improved and efforts turned to increasing the relevance and quality of services. The goal was to bring the internal culture of DBSC out into the community and re-evaluate problems on that basis.

4.3       When the Problem Is the Solution
DBSC contracts with state agencies, such as the Department of Services for the Blind to provide specialized, direct services to DeafBlind people. Therefore, what counts as a legitimate service is shaped as much by the structures and categories of the state agencies as it is by the needs and desires of the community. Adrijana had to find ways of addressing the discrepancies:
 
We noticed, as staff at DBSC, that senior citizens were coming in droves to discuss problems they were having. When we looked at what was going on, there usually wasn’t a problem. It seemed like they were home alone, socially isolated, going crazy, and had to invent a reason to come in and talk to someone. And then they would have to get caught up in some kind of imaginary problem as their only form of socializing. The advocate would get overwhelmed with all of this work that wasn’t really legitimate. They needed to have some kind of positive interaction. The goal was to relieve some of the problems that seemed to come from being isolated–paranoia, stress, etc.—and it worked.
 
Given the fact that severe social isolation was a real problem for older DeafBlind people, it seemed like they would have gotten together more often on their own. There were two main reasons they didn’t. First, even if they had, they wouldn’t be able to communicate with one another in groups, since no conventions had been established for this. Second, there was what Adrijana called a “leadership” problem:
 
"A lot of people were retiring, so what were they going to do? That problem became a first priority. We asked the senior citizens to bring their own SSPs rather than DBSC being responsible for coordinating SSPs, and each month they would be responsible for planning an event themselves. We called that “leadership,” and we expected it to go alright. But then we found out that they weren’t doing anything. They weren’t finding their own SSPs, they weren’t planning their own events. It was really surprising. They had just gotten so used to someone else doing everything for them. They’ll find me an SSP, they’ll plan the events, and so on. Conversations often went like this:
 
DEAFBLIND SENIOR CITIZEN: I need a ride.
DBSC STAFF PERSON: You find your own ride! Use the bus! Or call a cab!
 
And then nothing happened. So that was an indication of what had been going on all this time—people had become complacent and unable to do things for themselves, or at least not used to doing things for themselves. So I got really frustrated, and they got irritated, being asked to do things they didn’t want to do and weren’t accustomed to doing. So my great idea didn’t work, because people didn’t just snap into the role that I had in mind. I had to try to do what they expected, rather than trying to make them the kind of DeafBlind people I thought they should be. So I hired a coordinator for the DeafBlind Senior Citizen program. The goal then, was for that person to figure out how to work with DeafBlind people to build leadership potential without making the mistakes I had made, moving too fast and expecting things to change too quickly."
 
Essentially, Adrijana was asking people who had spent many years in the role of “the served” to step into the role of the service provider. Theresa Smith, a long time ethnographer in the Seattle DeafBlind community, writes about the problems this division between those who provide and those who receive services has caused (2002):
 
"Agencies naturally take their direction from the people who establish, fund and run them. Agencies serving DeafBlind people are typically funded and run by people outside the community. […] [Therefore] the people in positions of power and authority come from a different world than the people for whom the agency is established. This is a problem. Hearing/Sighted administrators and staff do not share the life experience (deafness, blindness) or socio-economic class (income and life style) of their clients. They do not even share a primary language and culture. Few professionals on staff and fewer administrators have native-like fluency in ASL and Deaf culture [ . . . ]. This creates an almost insurmountable gap in world view and in access to power. This difference in power has been institutionalized. [ . . . ] We want to move beyond the limits of the present to a future in which Deaf-Blind people have not only power but authority and control within these agencies established in their name."
 
Although there is a great deal of variation among DeafBlind people in terms of socio-economic class, life experience, access to education, etc., the roles of those providing and receiving services have historically been opposed and mutually exclusive. Therefore, if someone was receiving services, they were by definition not making decisions about how those services were administered. This led to problems like those that the senior citizens were experiencing.

There was no agency contracting with DBSC to pay for social events as a way of alleviating social isolation. DeafBlind people knew this, so they had to make their attempts at socializing into a problem suitable for the services that were provided. One of the unfortunate side effects was that DeafBlind senior citizens were shaped by the negative and irrelevant role they were often left playing. They had to put on a performance of distress sufficient to justify a meeting with the advocate. Although they were experiencing distress, the nature and cause of the distress had to be disguised in order to alleviate it.

For DBSC’s staff, redirecting some funds and organizing social events was much preferable to sifting through the details of intentionally confusing stories, as well as being overwhelmed by the number of clients who came in telling them. Furthermore, Adrijana thought DeafBlind people shouldn’t have to be in crisis in order to have human contact. The order of operations should be just the opposite. They should have human contact in order to avoid crisis. Therefore, she decided to use part of the advocacy budget to pay for minimal support to a DeafBlind Senior Citizen’s program. However, one meeting of the group required many volunteer interpreters (about two per participant). Soon after its inception, then, interpreters became a problem.
 
4.4       Learning about the World
Louise, a DeafBlind senior, and the first volunteer coordinator of the Deaf- Blind seniors program, described her attempts to keep the program up and running:
 
"Now we have a new director at DBSC, Adrijana, who asked me to work with the senior citizen’s program, trying to get it back on its feet, which I agreed to do. I have found volunteer [interpreters] who are ASL students. The students who have been helping have been absolutely wonderful. Right now we have 10 senior citizens in the program who are very happy to have the program back. But it is uncertain what will happen in the fall because many of our volunteers have to go to school. Some will find jobs. We need funding to pay for [. . .] [interpreters]. We want to get out of the house and learn more about the world. Many of us stay home for long periods of time, and are very lonely. Just yesterday I got a call from one senior citizen, who was crying because she was so lonely. She just wanted to get out of her house, but there were no [interpreters] available. It’s really bad."
 
The shortage of interpreters was the problem on the surface of things, but if interpreters weren’t used, there would no longer be a problem. This, however, would require a major transition where DeafBlind people learned to communicate directly with one another. If this could be accomplished, social isolation could be addressed without appealing to sighted people for support, and further taxing the already depleted interpreting resources.

Once Adrijana took up her post as director of DBSC, she and her new staff found that many of the problems they hoped to address, when thought through, were linked to the absence of direct contact with other people and the world. Why, for example, would a DeafBlind person need an interpreter or “SSP” to “learn more about the world”? One reason, Adrijana said, was that many DeafBlind people didn’t possess the technical skill of tactile reception. She and her team wanted to make learning that skill appealing. They thought it was strange that in the past, sighted people had often been the ones to teach tactile skills to DeafBlind people, even though they didn’t use that form of communication themselves. They thought that DeafBlind people should be the ones to teach it—not only because it was more practical, as they were the ones who really knew how it worked, but also because DeafBlind people should be able to turn this practical knowledge into expertise as such, which they could not do without opportunities to teach.

All of this went into planning a series of classes, which would be offered by DBSC to DeafBlind people, and taught by DeafBlind people, without the use of interpreters. The problem was that if they advertised the class as having anything to do with going tactile, no one would sign up—and especially not the ones who in Adrijana and Lee’s view really needed to sign up. Adrijana explained that “we knew the word ‘tactile’ would turn them off, so we changed it to ‘DeafBlind to DeafBlind class.’ That piqued people’s curiosity, because they didn’t already know what it was.” Most of the classes did not thematize tactility. They were about finance, cooking, wood-working, and other topics. The instructors, though, were all DeafBlind, as were the students, and no interpreters were provided. Tunnel-vision and tactile people were thrown together and expected to communicate directly with one another.

People who had not yet gone tactile were encouraged to wear blindfolds, but not required to do so. Lee taught the classes, and one of her main strategies was to have discussion groups. She organized people into pairs sitting opposite one another, and then gave them a question to discuss. After 5–7 minutes, she had them rotate so that every person in the room discussed the question with every other person in the room. It seemed time consuming, but she naturalized the process for the participants by saying “this is our culture” and “this is how we do things.” This way of doing things had benefits that she didn’t state explicitly in the classes but that, she told me later, shaped her approach:
 
It meant that there was more equality in access to information. When a group of sighted people are in a room together, they can all be looking at one another. Everyone knows what everyone thinks, what everyone feels, and what everyone says [. . .]. It doesn’t work to get everything through one person [an interpreter]. Then you’re totally disconnected from your environment and the people in it. I was interested in finding a way to make group engagement possible—such that you would feel actually connected to the people you were with and the place you were in.
 
At this early stage in the protactile movement, Lee was asking people to let go of who they were as tactile or tunnel-vision people (i.e. their identities), and focus instead on interpreting affordances in new ways that could correspond across the group. Starting with affordances and allowing one’s ideas about what constituted things like “group engagement” to shift to accommodate affordances made new forms of action possible.
 
 
4.5       Motivating Action
When I asked Adrijana about those early protactile workshops, she said they didn’t feel like an extraordinary success. The reason, she explained had to do with two, interconnected facts: First, as we see in Lee’s encounters, people had identities, which they did not just relinquish on request. Second, those identities were bound up with certain prescriptions for how information should flow. Adrijana explained:
 
"People already have their ways of doing things. Senior Citizens love to go to the monthly meetings [at DBSC] in order to talk to their [interpreters]! They love it because they get information from them. They don’t see DeafBlind people as a source of information. . . ."
 
Information flowed from sighted people to DeafBlind people and this pattern had institutional roots. As individuals became blind, they generally had less opportunity to occupy the role of the “service provider” and were increasingly thrust into the role of the “served” (Smith 2002). Where information was concerned, that role meant being a recipient of information, maybe a relay for information, but never its primary source. When Adrijana explained that DeafBlind people were not seen as a source of information, she left room for the possibility that this was a bias people had but maybe not representative of the facts as she experienced them, so I asked her if she thought it was true that DeafBlind people didn’t have any information to share. She said:
 
"I think DeafBlind people have a disconnect between information that they have and ways of expressing it. I think when interpreters share information, it gets their minds working again—connections start happening, and then they can share with other DeafBlind people. It’s like their brains come alive again, but they need a kick start."
 
This “disconnect” does not derive merely from lack of contact with others. It runs deeper, since whatever information, knowledge, or experience that is generated in daily life is generated primarily via tactile channels. Prior to the protactile movement, the way the environment was channeled differed across individuals, even if all of the individuals involved were “tactile” people. There was no shared, tactile world. To make matters more complicated, there was no system of representation available for expressing knowledge about any tactile world, shared or not. Therefore, while individuals may have been exploring in their own way, accruing idiosyncratic forms of knowledge, there was, in Adrijana’s terms, a disconnect between the information they had and the means they had for expressing it.

In the years leading up to this moment, interventions were based on the widespread assumption that if connections between DeafBlind people and the world were growing tenuous, sighted people could be inserted as a relay, and the whole world would be kept intact (Chapter 2). However, Adrijana is pointing here to widespread problems that arose as this relay system played out over time. Most fundamentally, DeafBlind people were drifting awayninto their own idiosyncratic world. At some level, communication was still possible. Utterances, more or less, made their way from one DeafBlind person to another, but the utility, relevance, and impact of those utterances were compromised since the receiver had no way to tell if the effects of utterances and other signs on them corresponded in any way to the effects they had on others. This applied just as much to complex acts of communication as it did to basic interactions with the environment.

In a shared world, we observe the refraction of events of all kinds across participants. Our attention is drawn, as children, to differences in how individuals and types of individuals respond in more or less effective and appropriate ways to conflict, accident, injury, and so on. As we develop into adulthood, we internalize some behaviors and not others as the “right” way, or the “wrong” way to respond, and our sensibilities about the kinds of people we like, respect, or dismiss begin to form. By virtue of that process, we find ourselves repulsed by, drawn to, or unaffected by certain people, and we can feel others’ indifference, attraction, or repulsion to us. Even inanimate things call out to us, or repel us, in particular ways (Clark 2015; Gibson 2015 [1977]). Being caught up on those dynamics is part of what it means to be someone (in particular). In other words, action in the world presupposes being affected by the world.
Adrijana, in recalling the earliest protactile workshops, homed in on these dynamics, and their absence, among tactile people. She explained that things went along alright as long as the workshops were being led by a tunnel-vision person, but then there was a class taught by Robert, a tactile person. Adrijana said, “Everyone assumed since Robert was a blind DeafBlind person, that he would be with an interpreter. But just like all of the other classes, no one had an interpreter. Several students dropped the class when they found that out. Robert felt demoralized.” I asked Adrijana if people gave a reason when they dropped the class and she said they had: “There are no interpreters and Robert is blind.” It turns out that when pressed further, they didn’t feel safe. Robert was teaching wood-working and he was using a large, electric saw and a drill. Adrijana explains:
 
"Before Robert even plugged in the machine, they were scared to death. Robert just wanted to show them the machine and they freaked out. They thought there would be interpreters there, and they would have more of an observational role, but that isn’t what we had in mind."
 
I asked Adrijana if she thought their fears were warranted, and she said that at first she didn’t think so. But then a while later, she was helping make a bunch of cloth napkins for a DeafBlind event with friends—both DeafBlind and sighted—all of whom had significantly more vision than she did. She fearlessly ventured forth with the sewing machine and ended up putting the needle through her index finger. “I laughed,” she said, “but it hurt like hell.” After that, she changed her perspective on the issue. People didn’t trust their ability to interpret tactile signals in their environment, and they didn’t trust that people would be able to communicate about the environment in ways that would prevent injury when trying to use a dangerous machine. They were right. Not only were their sensory orientations always shifting, there was a definite disconnect between tactile experience and the visual language they had at their disposal, ASL. In addition, there was a great deal of variation among the group in terms of sensory orientation and there were no conventionalized practices that established meaningful correspondences across those differences. All of this made learning how to use new, potentially dangerous equipment without the use of interpreters a bad idea. In a shared world, representations of the world and the world itself are intricately interwoven in childhood and into adulthood. We internalize those connections and on that basis we build instruments (such as sewing machines, cars, and microscopes). We interact with the world based not only on the relation between our bodies, the environment, and the affordances therein, but also on the basis of how others have done so before us, the pathways they have built for us, and the tools they have created.

Leaders of the protactile movement intuitively grasped these complexities and they took a very different path than the one taken in the decades prior. Instead of trying to maintain pre-existing norms, they shifted attention to latent affordances in the environment that could speak, in corresponding ways, across the collective. Without this, there was little motivation to speak, interact with others, or interact with the environment, and in fact there were real deterrents to doing so.
 
4.6       Re-defining Roles
As action was motivated, the roles available to DeafBlind people in Seattle, and the value associated with those roles, began to shift. The process, however, was not seamless. For example, Adrijana told me that in the 2007 protac- tile workshops, people kept dropping the class—a first round dropped the class because they didn’t trust that blind people could operate instruments designed by sighted people, and they didn’t see blind people as information- sources in the first place. The next round of people who dropped the course,
according to Adrijana, did so when they were asked to go to a coffee shop and use tactile communication in public. While many of them were willing to communicate through touch in a private class, they were unwilling to do so in public. Each of these exit points in the 2007 workshops revealed something about roles and the value associated with them. And then there was the question of language.

I asked Adrijana, in 2010, if she thought that there had been an effect on language and communication practices, despite the initial lack of enthusiasm about the classes and the difficulty they had trying to keep people from leaving. Her response went back to the resiliency (or not) of roles:
 
"What I think has been happening is that there is more overlap. Before there was a crystal clear separation between [tunnel-vision people] and [tactile people]. Now they are mixing a little."
 
She went on to explain that homogenization of communication practices seemed necessary and also posed a serious challenge, as those practices were rooted in particular roles and, importantly, asymmetric role-relations:
 
"There’s so much variation. Now we’re just trying to slowly close the gap between the two sides. That will help people to transition to our side—the tactile side—and it will keep people from being able to reject us. They can’t do that any more. So my experience of the changes since 2007 really includes this narrowing of the gap and a recognition of the importance of that. All this time I thought that it really hadn’t gotten any better and that was that. But deep down, I knew we had gotten off to a great start. It’s just that I had no idea how it would grow or if it would. That’s why I say it’s all very new, and things are changing very slowly. As far as how it will all end up, I think we have to wait five years or something to find out."
 
Over the next decade, a major shift in roles had transpired. At the time Adrijana is recounting, the tactile/tunnel-vision divide was robust, and for reasons discussed in previous chapters, there was a clear preference for tunnel-vision status. Since then, the relevant distinction has become “protactile” vs. “not protactile.” Being protactile means greater access to status, employment, and opportunities of all kinds (Edwards 2018). In addition, communication practices, as well as the linguistic system itself, have changed radically (Clark and Nuccio 2020; Edwards and Brentari 2020).

At the time, though, Adrijana was far from certain that roles were changing and she wasn’t sure if anything at all in the language itself had changed. She said that she thought some things were new—like describing spatial relations by pointing to locations on the palm of the addressee rather than in the space in front of the signer, but she said that, “in DeafBlind to DeafBlind class we never talked about it. We just did what we did. I don’t even know what we did. Really, you’re asking me if things have changed and I don’t really know.” If things had changed, it wasn’t clear when certain practices had come into use, or how widely they were in use. She was certain that they didn’t teach any new communication practices in these first classes. People “just started picking things up from other people and incorporating what [they] liked. And then some of it stuck and was history.”
 
4.7       Going Tactile
As I started my dissertation research in 2010, Adrijana and Lee were looking for another opportunity to teach classes like the ones they had taught before in 2007, but funding had been scarce, and they had been busy with other projects. I was looking for ways to systematically observe the changes in communication and language that had been occurring, so I contributed part of my dissertation funding for a second round of classes. We started having planning meetings in the fall of 2010 and the classes started that winter. Adrijana and Lee prepared the content of the courses and selected and recruited participants. I helped coordinate logistics and managed tasks specific to research, such as organizing the collection of video data and obtaining consent from participants. A team of sighted people videorecorded the classes, but did not otherwise take part in them. There were two groups: Group A and Group B—each comprised of five or six students and two teachers. Ten two-hour classes were offered to Group A over the course of five weeks and ten two-hour classes were offered to Group B, also over the course of five weeks.

When the participants arrived, they were told once again that they would have to figure out how to communicate with each other, without any inter- preters. Adrijana already knew, from past experience, that getting rid of sighted mediators would be badly received, but Adrijana and Lee were per- sistent. They felt that what they were doing was natural, or intuitive, and once people started doing it, they would be hooked. By the time they started with the second group, Group B, they had some learning objectives, and some experience in achieving them. One of those learning objectives was to get people in the habit of sitting together in ways that made consistent, tactile contact, a given. This, they argued, would generate a basis for tactile interaction and communication. There are many ways this might have been accomplished, but during the first five weeks of the workshops, with Group A, they had settled on particular conventions.

Lee explained, for example, that in a group of three, people should have their knees touching and their legs pointing inward toward a common center, so each person could comfortably reach the thigh of the other two people. Her reasoning was as follows:
 
"I like always having three legs in contact with each other, here [touching Amanda’s leg], here [touching her own leg] and here [touching George’s leg]. If our legs are always in contact, then we don’t have to go looking for each other, we just know that the other people are there, and how they are positioned in relation to us. You know, you don’t want to accidentally reach out and touch the other person in a way you didn’t mean, or in a way they didn’t expect. When we sit like this, we’re right here together and we can feel that and we can respond to things other people say."
 
It is clear here that Lee’s first focus is on co-presence—“We are all here together.” This particular way of sitting started to occur and became con- ventional during Group A’s workshops. It happened, people noticed it was happening and drew attention to it, it was tested, and it worked, so Lee and Adrijana called it “protactile.” Now, in this stretch of interaction, Lee is introducing this as an established practice, and is pointing out the benefits of it. She goes on to say:
 
"If Amanda is talking, George and I can move our hands to her leg like this [demonstrates], and tap on her leg to show we are listening and interested in what she is saying. Then when George starts talking, we can move our hands onto his leg, all together. Deaf people use their eyes for that. If a Deaf person wasn’t maintaining eye contact when you were talking to them, you would say, “Hey! Pay attention!” Right? [both students nod, but do not provide tactile feedback]. DeafBlind people need that same thing—they need to establish attention—and they do that by putting their hands on each other’s thighs, instead of maintaining eye contact. Being in contact like this, tapping, it’s like saying, “I’m here, and I’m paying attention to you.”"
 
Lee’s students immediately understand the relevance and importance of this. George, however, is poised for a set of rules. He wants to know what the technique is, exactly—Where exactly should you touch the other person, and how? What does each small difference mean? Lee answers that there are no specific rules, or rigid meanings. The point, she says, is to think about whether or not the other person can feel what you are doing and from there, you just “express yourself” by tapping or squeezing their leg, for example, just as a hearing person might nod or say “mmmmm,” or gasp, so they know you’re listening and how you feel.
Conventions like this were established, reflected on, named, and charac- terized as “protactile.” This made it possible to interpret affordances in new ways, thereby motivating new pathways for action, which in turn, affected the reconfiguration of roles and the value that accrued to those roles. Ultimately, this process gave rise to a new “protactile” way of being DeafBlind, such that you could ask, “Is she protactile?” and there would be a clear answer to that question.

It all starts with particular ways of reading affordances in the environment in ways that correspond across the group. For example, the idea that changing the way you habitually sit with others for purposes of conversation so your legs can be in constant contact. Then, within that configuration, realizing together that different ways of tapping or squeezing might have affordances for backchanneling, or telling the person who is speaking that you are listening and how you feel about what they are saying. Uncovering affordances for co-presence, or just being together, leads to the discovery of additional affordances, and so on. Across those various domains, patterns in how affordances are interpreted begin to form, which are detectable across the group and can be extended to new domains. This is why, as opposed to interpreter-mediated interaction, protactile practices feel intuitive. This is a refrain from both Lee and Adrijana: What we are doing here is intuitive—not on the level of the individual, but for the collective. I express myself in a way that feels intuitive to me and that I anticipate will feel intuitive to you as well. If it doesn’t, it falls out of the experiment. If it does, it gets picked up and is history.

Many practices were ratified and quickly internalized by Group A, including a habit of pulling the listener’s hand to the signer’s throat when laughing, so they could feel the particular vibration of the signer’s laugh. Prior to this moment, DeafBlind people and interpreters told one another they were laugh- ing by producing a manual sign, “Ha Ha,” which is borrowed from English via fingerspelling. Someone would say something funny, and the listener would say, “H-A H-A.” Now, Lee was introducing something different—something that had already been internalized by her and others, as “protactile” in Group A’s session a few weeks earlier. Amanda, however, had only experienced this strange practice with a single individual—Roman. Roman was many things that Amanda was not. He was tall and Amanda was short. He had grown up mostly in hearing environments and she had grown up mostly in Deaf environments. He did whatever it took to communicate. She was concerned with decorum. So when Lee pulled the back of Amanda’s hand to Lee’s throat, Amanda said, “Like Roman! I hate it when he does that!” Lee pauses for a moment to consider this potentially unfavorable association, but she says that Roman is just one person. “What if everyone does it?” she says, “Then it might come off differently.” Amanda counters that Roman is too tall, so when he pulls your hand to his throat, your hand goes straight up in the air and then runs into his tall, weird throat. Lee again pauses to consider this unfortunate association and says, optimistically, that there are solutions to all of these things. Ken, she says, is another tall person, and what he does is bend over when he’s communicating with short people. Then she laughs and pulls her hands to her throat so they can feel her laughing. It’s funny— the image of big, tall Ken, lumbering over to small people and then hovering above them to communicate. They go on talking about really tall DeafBlind people they know and really short DeafBlind people they know trying to communicate and then they laugh, each time pulling the listeners’ hands to the backs of their throats. George says: “Ken and Lynn! She’s so short! Like this tall  ” He holds his hand, palm down, about 3 feet above the ground and laughs, pulling Lee and Amanda’s hands to his throat as he doubles over and his face turns red. All three collapse into laughter together. Transcribing it, I laughed too. It’s hilarious! Meanwhile, as they laugh, they pull one another’s hands to their throats. This practice had caught on only a couple of minutes after it was introduced, even in the midst of protest against it.

Interactions like these support Adrijana and Lee’s claims that protactile practices are so intuitive that they can go from new to part of the common sense in minutes, no matter what the explicit arguments against it may be. It’s as if common pathways to the environment were already there— DeafBlind people just had to clear off the clutter that stood in the way and they would drop right in. When I say clutter, I mean negative associations people have with certain channels, modalities, and specific practices therein, such as Amanda’s complaints above, and also normative constraints that apply more broadly. Several people complained when this hand-to-throat practice was introduced that it seemed like an “oral” thing. For them, all things “oral” were self-evidently bad so a negative value accrued to the practice. However, this practice was not about accessing speech or sound. It was about vibration: to tap the affordances of vibration and the very specific differences that could be detected in each person’s laughter. Deaf sighted norms had to be pushed aside. Another time, early on in the second set of workshops, Lee was teaching a student how to give simple feedback on the leg of the speaker, by tapping. The student said, “OK, I see how this works when you’re sitting down, but what about when you’re standing up?” Lee responds by saying, “I’ve been talking to Adrijana about this, but you know what’s great about all of this. When you’re standing up with other people, suddenly you realize you already know what to do.” There is a sense that, even if you can’t explain how something will work, as you become more protactile you will just know what to do. It is a matter of reinforcing your own intuitions or paying attention to what you already understand about the world, often without realizing. Being protactile begins in collective interpretations of affordances, but in order for patterns of interpretation to converge, the possibility of convergence had to be taken for granted. This is not possible if the environment is hidden, out of bounds, or inconsistent.

For example, early on in Group B’s workshops, one of the participants notices that she and another person in her group have this habit of holding their hands (which are in contact with the signer) up in the air while they are listening with their other hands to Lee. Their hands are up by their ears, hanging there in a really uncomfortable position. Lee tries to explain to them by saying that when their hands are up there they are disconnected from her as the speaker. Those hands are supposed to be providing feedback, and when they’re not on her leg she can’t tell if they’re listening or not. Every time their hands float up, off of her leg, she pushes them back down. She does that repeatedly, but their hands keep floating back up. At some point, they all start laughing at how ridiculous this is. Their shoulders are getting sore, they’re getting tired, and yet, they keep doing it. They can’t explain their own behavior and in a protactile environment this habit suddenly seems absurd. Lee responds by saying:
 
"These problems of signing up here, and holding your hands up in this space, are all because of tunnel-vision. If you’re used to signing for tunnel vision people, you’re going to keep your hands up in that space where tunnel-vision people can see, as a habit. Even if a tunnel-vision person is talking to someone who is sighted, they sign like that because that’s their signing space. [To the more tunnel-vision student:] It is something people like you and [another tunnel-vision person] do, and others who are not tactile. It’s something you all do because you’re used to communicating in that tunnel-vision way. Once you start communicating with tactile people, your arms come down, and can rest and be natural. It’s really incredible how the body can change, slowly, and adapt to your experiences."
 
Lee is focused here not on how much vision a person has but on the channels that organize the person’s environment and social network. We see in interactions like those recounted above that bridging the gap between tunnel-vision people and tactile people promises a form of stability required for “autonomous” interaction with the environment. To act in the world, the world must be there. This includes people too, so when you walk out your front door in the morning, you don’t have to worry about limbs floating off or freezing in mid-air. You know, in some basic sense, how the ground will resist you when you step on it, what would happen if you jumped into a body of water, and how a person will be present to you when sharing the same physical space. Without assurances such as these, autonomous action in the world is impossible.
Lee and Adrijana worked against powerful forces to bring people into a common center. As they did that, the environment started sending out messages, which could be interpreted and acted on without hesitation. From there, many things became possible that had previously been impossible. For example, watching other people do things like knit a scarf, read a Braille book, or play a game. One of the games people played, and enjoyed watching, was called “Tactile Pictionary.” Two people would sit facing each other, and they would take turns molding playdough into different shapes and then guessing what it was supposed to be. The observers would stand behind them, chest to back, hands on hands, tracking their movement. Afterward, the players reflected on the experience. They said: You know that playdough is being rolled out, but beyond that, you know how it is being rolled out—at what pace, with what intensity, and to what effect. From there, you can speculate about the temperament of the roller, or you can notice traces of their culinary habits mixed with the smell of their dog and their body and you can associate that unique olfactory combination with them like a fingerprint or a signature that can be recognized anywhere. You know that there is another person there, but beyond that you have access to the tension in the tendons and muscles of their hands, arms, and neck. From there you can speculate about their level of interest in the game or you can begin to appreciate their tactile agility as their fingers dart around the curves and corners of the sculpture, and then leap up off of the object to announce a best guess to the group. After a while, you begin to like people, or not. You begin to feel drawn into things, or repulsed by them. The meanings of utterances become overdetermined and expectable, and you begin to feel that you are part of a world.

Prior to the protactile movement, “going tactile” was something people did reluctantly and only when they could no longer operate in the tunnel-vision role. It did not lead to an intense and particular world that called forth action, since the only thing that really changed was the channel through which linguistic signs were transferred. The world itself was the world of the sighted. Going tactile meant that the distance between the self and the world was growing. In Chapter 3, I showed how the Seattle DeafBlind community, in
the decades prior, addressed that growing distance by relying more on sighted interpreters to mediate. The first step toward mediation was establishing an identity, on the basis of which, resources are made available. The DeafBlind identities that process gave rise to were, however, resting on unstable ground. The reason, I argued, had to do with the order in which the world was re- assembled. The world contains instruments, which we grasp in terms of their affordances for action. In performing actions habitually, we take on roles; and in routinely taking on roles, we have an identity, or way of being in the world (Kockelman 2006a). For the first three decades of Seattle’s DeafBlind history, the community proceeded from identity to roles to action. Since the inception of the protactile movement, the community has begun to reverse this process. First, normative constraints and other clutter that kept tactile affordances hidden were removed and tactile affordances in the environment were seized upon. This motivated action and generated new roles, which gave rise to a new way of being DeafBlind.

This process increased “autonomy” (granda and Nuccio 2018). In observing the use of this term across interactions, however, it is clear that it does not map perfectly onto its English counterpart. The protactile word is produced by pressing the back of the fingers onto the center of the addressee’s chest, while moving it down two times in rapid succession. Contact is made, more specifically, in a location associated with the heart. The resulting word combines a meaning derived from the ASL sign “inside” with the notion of “feeling” or “sense,” derived from the location on the addressee’s body where the word is produced. When the term is translated into English, it tends to be glossed “autonomy,” but in use, it also aligns with notions of “intuition” and “effectiveness.” A DeafBlind person is acting autonomously if they are seeking out affordances in their environment, which are intuitive and effective for them, rather than adhering to norms that are appropriate, but not effective. The protactile word asks people to direct their attention to tactile affordances in the environment, which are already present, but may be obscured. Once you are grasping affordances in the world rather than receiving descriptions of the world, new possibilities for who you can talk to, where you can go, and what you can do proliferate. You are less dependent on sighted guides and interpreters because the environment becomes interpretable, and therefore you have increased “autonomy” in the sense of the English word.

Depending on the complex set of identities DeafBlind persons might have, however, transgressions of dominant norms will present different kinds of consequences. For example, in 2020, Najma Johnson published an essay describing a conflict that, among white protactile leaders and theorists, had not been sufficiently addressed. Johnson writes:
 
"I truly love LOVE Protactile. It makes me feel great. There are some aspects of PT that do not sit well with me.   I love the concept/belief about autonomy behind PT. It is a wonderful thing for us to have autonomy AND it is not always realistic. Does [a DeafBlind person of color] have autonomy? No, not the same way as White DeafBlind folks. We could try and claim our autonomy. Unfortunately, it is regulated by White [DeafBlind people]. Race and Culture play a huge role with ‘autonomy’. . . . It is IMPERATIVE that we require cultural flexibility  Autonomy is not always positive for many of us."
 
Johnson points out that the risks for DeafBlind persons of color in breaking White norms are higher than for those who are White. Strain is felt unevenly and this is an ongoing point of tension as the protactile movement continues to grow and spread. Related issues have been raised by those who have experienced trauma associated with touch. In sighted societies, touch is severely restricted in terms of the functions it can serve (Clark 2017). Those functions are often limited to intimate encounters, violence, and child rearing. Therefore, when an individual has suffered trauma, the frequent touching experienced in protactile environments can be particu- larly hard to habituate to. In one case, for example, a young woman was interested in learning protactile, but disclosed to several of us that she had suffered abuse. The DeafBlind instructors leading the event worked out a step-wise plan to restrict touch and then slowly introduce new practices. I have observed variable success with approaches like these, and conversations are ongoing. A third and related problem involves DeafBlind people who have not had access to touch are therefore sometimes overwhelmed when there is a sudden stream of tactile stimuli to parse and interpret. All of these experiences generate different, and sometimes conflicting, points of entry into the project of building a more tactile world, and are points of tension at the center of public debate as the protactile movement continues to spread and transform.
 
4.8       Conclusion
In this chapter, I have analyzed interviews, ethnographic field notes, and archival materials in order to provide an account of the inception of the protactile movement in Seattle, Washington, in the 2010s. This movement has since grown in many ways that could not have been predicted at the time I conducted this research, and in places I am unfamiliar with. This chapter is not meant to be a comprehensive or complete account. Precisely the opposite: It is meant to highlight the historically and culturally specific dynamics that gave rise to protactile principles and practices in Seattle. It is an open question how historical and cultural dynamics elsewhere will affect the protactile movement wherever it touches down and takes root. Further research will surely uncover new understandings of what it means to be protactile and what conditions must be in place to enable that process.

​In the next chapter, I focus on the role of language in reinforcing new, pro- tactile ways of being. This shifts attention from residing in to representing the world. At the center of analysis is an emerging “deictic” system, or linguistic system used to direct attention to objects in the immediate environment. In analyzing conditions that give rise to that system, I focus on a moment when patterns in how people reside in the world exert pressure on the internal structure of language. While the newness of the language in this case is highly unusual, it foregrounds something that is surely true for us all: At any given moment in history, there will be some restricted set of options for how we can be, and every time we refer to, or talk about, anything at all, we must choose just one of those options. Given this, reference can operate like a switch, which, due to its seeming simplicity and concreteness, can push people toward one way of being or another, without any explicit mention of identity, language, or other common topics of political discourse.