Protactile Research Network
Academic Publications
(2024) Going Tactile: Life at the Limits of Language
In the 2010s, Leaders in the DeafBind community in Seattle called into question the community's dependence on sighted interpreters and sought new ways of communicating, interacting, and navigating through touch. This effort became the "protactile movement", and it spread quickly across the country. In "Going Tactile", Anthropologist Terra Edwards draws on thirty months of ethnographic fieldwork with DeafBlind artists, intellectuals, political leaders, and community members, to show how autonomous spaces away from sighted norms were created and life was re-imagined. In doing so, she offers a new perspective on the nature of language, its limits, and what it means to find a new way of being in the world.
(2024) Becoming Protactile: Interactional Foundations of Protactile Language Development and Language Emergence
Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, many DeafBlind children were left without access to educational services when schools went remote. This article presents findings from a project that brought DeafBlind adults into the homes of DeafBlind children during a historically unprecedented time, when a new language was emerging among DeafBlind people who call themselves “Protactile”. In analyzing interactions between the DeafBlind adults and children, we have gained new insights into how novel communication channels are forged intersubjectively. We focus our analysis on Jelica, a DeafBlind member of the research team and experienced Protactile educator, and her interactions with two DeafBlind children. Grounding her extensive field notes in an anthropological theory on intersubjectivity, her insights show how they gradually became attuned to each other and their environment, thereby laying the foundation for intention attribution and joint attention. Jelica does this, in part, via frequent use of “Protactile taps”, which have attention-modulating and demonstrative functions among adults. Jelica’s taps perform a “meta-channel” function to direct the child to use particular parts of their bodies for communication and exploration. This study shows how Jelica establishes an operable environment, within which the vocabulary and grammar she exposes them to will take on situated meaning. This research builds on previous work on language emergence by showing that both children and adults contribute to language emergence as they adjust to one another in the unfolding of interaction. Finally, this research calls attention to the need for DeafBlind adults to have institutional authority to shape communication practices for DeafBlind children.
(2023) The medium of intersubjectivity
The aim of this article is to contribute to anthropological understandings of intersubjectivity by foregrounding the role of the environment. I begin by reviewing three key approaches that have emerged out of broader debates in the humanities and social sciences. The first mobilizes intersubjectivity as a way of explaining how a coherent social order is (re-)produced, given that the rational choice, for individuals, is to act in their own self-interest. Intersubjectivity in this view is the shared understanding that is achieved when actors adhere to normative constraints on interaction in order to fulfill an unconscious desire to be loved and accepted by others. The second approach to intersubjectivity challenges this idea, arguing that the motivations and expectations that individuals bring to interaction vary across ethnographic contexts, and for some, shared understanding is a false promise that masks the harmful intentions others are likely to have. Intersubjectivity, in this view, is organized by a desire to minimize exposure to others. The third approach treats intersubjectivity not as a possible outcome of interaction but as an existential condition that makes meaningful interaction possible. In this article, I put these debates in dialogue with “protactile theory,” which has grown out of a social movement in DeafBlind communities in the United States. Reading protactile theory through the lens of biosemiotics, ecological psychology, and existential phenomenology, I argue that the medium or “the thing we’re in when we’re together” is the basis of intelligibility for all intersubjective behaviors and capacities; it can define a way of being, is ethnographically graspable, and is central to how humans interact.
(2023) The Hands as Reflex Republic
Among linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists interested in multimodal communication, much attention has been paid to the motor activity of the hands. Psychologists have treated the hands as a window onto the mind and as a facilitator of thought. Linguists have treated the hands as articulators of linguistic signs, and linguistic anthropologists have treated the hands as an integral part of broader, interacting semiotic processes. This essay builds on these approaches by attending to DeafBlind observations about the communicative potential of the hands. Hands are what you touch when you meet someone, and their texture, temperature, and movements remain available to you over the course of an interaction. From the hands' qualities, the rest of the person and their environment can be inferred. From this perspective, the hands appear not only as a window onto the mind, as a facilitator of thought, or as an articulator of signs, but also as a kind of appendage to the self—like cilia, left out in the world to register the dynamics of social life. This suggests new methodological possibilities for analyzing the motoric activity of hands as a sociocultural and biosemiotic problem.
(2022) The difference intersubjective grammar makes in protactile DeafBlind communities
Over the past several decades, linguists have accumulated evidence for “engagement systems”—a type of grammatical system that has the special role of facilitating intersubjective engagement. Meanwhile, anthropologists and sociologists have shown the many ways that intersubjective engagement is accomplished without special linguistic resources, depending instead on interactional and social structures and capacities. This has raised a question about whether or not intersubjective grammar, as such, really matters. This article addresses that question by examining interactions between DeafBlind people at a time when new engagement systems were emerging alongside new ways of being DeafBlind. Building on more than a decade of research tracking the emergence of those systems, I show how they are deployed strategically for broader socio-political purposes. I conclude by proposing that for a typology of engagement systems, deep ethnographic inquiry conducted alongside linguistic description and interactional analysis will allow us to understand not only how those systems are structured, but why they matter for the people who use them.
(2021) The Grammatical Incorporation of Demonstratives in an Emerging Tactile Language
In this article, we analyze the grammatical incorporation of demonstratives in a tactile language, emerging in communities of DeafBlind signers in the US who communicate via reciprocal, tactile channels—a practice known as “protactile.” In the first part of the paper, we report on a synchronic analysis of recent data, identifying four types of “taps,” which have taken on different functions in protacitle language and communication. In the second part of the paper, we report on a diachronic analysis of data collected over the past 8 years. This analysis reveals the emergence of a new kind of “propriotactic” tap, which has been co-opted by the emerging phonological system of protactile language. We link the emergence of this unit to both demonstrative taps, and backchanneling taps, both of which emerged earlier. We show how these forms are all undergirded by an attention-modulation function, more or less backgrounded, and operating across different semiotic systems. In doing so, we contribute not only to what is known about demonstratives in tactile languages, but also to what is known about the role of demonstratives in the emergence of new languages.
(2021) Intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity is a relation between subjectivities, which for humans can involve sensory access to each other and the environment, a taken-for-granted sense that participants can adopt reciprocal perspectives in a shared world, the ability to narrow in on objects of attention and reference together, a reflexive grasp of how experiences and entities relate to types of experiences and entities, as well as the prospective and retrospective orientations that implies, language-use and embodied communication, which are useful in drawing attention to the relevant aspects of setting and expressing stances toward them, and finally, recognition of, or orientation to, social and institutional facts. Approaches to intersubjectivity in linguistic anthropology have been developed in response to a range of problems. Depending on the problem being addressed, the elements included, as well as their organization and weighting, will shift. In this entry, key approaches to intersubjectivity are discussed in relation to the main problems they address or presuppose.
(2021). A Protactile-Inspired Wearable Haptic Device for Capturing the Core Functions of Communication.
In this article, a novel wearable haptic device, to be worn on the hand and forearm, is introduced. Using the modalities of vibration, pressure, and heat application, the device attempts to replicate four core components of communication. The four components--co-presence, phatic communication, back-channeling, and direction-giving are simulated through haptic profiles individually unique to a section or combined as an encompassing system of the device. This paper evaluates the performance of the device through three testing phases with sighted-hearing and DeafBlind individuals. Results indicate that a strong majority of the tested haptic profiles show statistical significance in replication between individuals. This article is unique in its collaboration with the protactile DeafBlind community, individuals who communicate solely through touch, by furthering understanding on how to generate intuitive tactile profiles in wearable haptic devices.
(2020) Feeling Phonology: The conventionalization of phonology in protactile communities in the United States
A new phonological system is becoming conventional across a group of DeafBlind signers in the United States, who communicate via reciprocal, tactile channels--a practice known as "Protactile". The recent conventionalization of protactile phonology is analyzed in this paper. Research on emergent visual signed languages has demonstrated that conventionalization is not a single monolithic process, but a complex of principles involving patterns of distribution--discreteness, stability, and productivity of form--as form becomes linked with meaning in increasingly stable ways. Conventionalization of protactile phonology involves assigning specific grammatical roles to the four hands (and arms) of Signer 1 ("conveyer") and Signer 2 ("receiver") in "proprioceptive constructions" (PCs)--comparable to "classifier constructions" in visual signed languages. Analyzing PCs offers new insights into how the conventionalization of a phonological system can play out in the tactile modality.
(2019) Kink
“No doubt many of you will want to dismiss my whole argument as a futile exercise in bogus mathematics. I don’t accept that.” –E.R. Leach
In some places, the surface of the world is smooth. Everyday life unfolds and existence is affirmed. In others, it is riddled with gaps, loops, sink holes, and insurmountable blockades. Just being in the world feels like a full time job, and at some point, it becomes impossible to cope. At this limit, existence itself is threatened. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research in DeafBlind communities where the surface of the world is not smooth, this paper asks: What if, using algebra, topology, and a little bit of calculus, this limit could be represented mathematically, and transposed, universally, onto any landscape containing humans in order to localize (and prevent!) existential crisis.
In some places, the surface of the world is smooth. Everyday life unfolds and existence is affirmed. In others, it is riddled with gaps, loops, sink holes, and insurmountable blockades. Just being in the world feels like a full time job, and at some point, it becomes impossible to cope. At this limit, existence itself is threatened. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research in DeafBlind communities where the surface of the world is not smooth, this paper asks: What if, using algebra, topology, and a little bit of calculus, this limit could be represented mathematically, and transposed, universally, onto any landscape containing humans in order to localize (and prevent!) existential crisis.
(2018) Re-channeling Language: The mutual restructuring of language and infrastructure at Gallaudet University
This article is concerned with the re-channeling of language. It asks: what role does the material environment play in turning a visual language into a tactile language? To pursue that question, I examine language and infrastructure among DeafBlind people at Gallaudet University. Since 2005, new walkways, buildings, furniture, and other aspects of the local urban landscape have been designed with the practices of Deaf people in mind. Recently, under the influence of the protactile movement, attention has turned to the tactile dimensions of design. As advisors, practitioners, and consultants contributing to these efforts, DeafBlind people seek not only to broaden the range of sensory channels linking them to their environment, but also to create environments that reinforce those connections across linguistic, sensory, and environmental domains. Drawing on the notion of “channel” as it has been applied and developed in linguistic anthropology, the study of signed languages, and among scholars interested in embodied interaction, I argue that the re-channeling of language among DeafBlind people at Gallaudet implicates channels of transmission. It cannot, however, be reduced to an effect of their affordances. Rather, the signer’s perceptions of what is possible in communication are shaped by more general perceptions of what is possible in life, and what is possible in life depends on infrastructure.
(2017) Sign-Creation in the Seattle DeafBlind Community: A triumphant story about the regeneration of obviousness
This article examines the social and interactional foundations of sign-creation among DeafBlind people in Seattle, Washington. Linguists studying signed languages have proposed models of sign-creation that involve the selection of an iconic gestural representation of the referent which is subjected to grammatical constraints and is thereby incorporated into the linguistic system. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork and more than 190 hours of video recordings of interaction and language use, I argue that a key interactional mechanism driving processes of sign-creation among DeafBlind people in Seattle is deictic integration. Deictic integration restricts the range of contextual values that the grammar can retrieve by coordinating systems of reference with patterns in activity. This process brings language into alignment with the world as it is perceived by the users of that language, making a range of potentially iconic relations available for selection in the creation of new signs.
(2015) Bridging the Gap between DeafBlind Minds: Interactional and social foundations of intention attribution in the Seattle DeafBlind community
This article is concerned with social and interactional processes that simplify pragmatic acts of intention attribution. The empirical focus is a series of interactions among DeafBlind people in Seattle, Washington, where pointing signs are used to individuate objects of reference in the immediate environment. Most members of this community are born deaf and slowly become blind. They come to Seattle using Visual American Sign Language, which has emerged and developed in a field organized around visual modes of access. As vision deteriorates, however, links between deictic signs (such as pointing) and the present, remembered, or imagined environment erode in idiosyncratic ways across the community of language-users, and as a result, it becomes increasingly difficult for participants to converge on objects of reference. In the past, DeafBlind people addressed this problem by relying on sighted interpreters. Under the influence of the recent “pro-tactile” movement, they have turned instead to one another to find new solutions to these referential problems. Drawing on analyses of 120h of videorecorded interaction and language-use, detailed fieldnotes collected during 12 months of sustained anthropological fieldwork, and more than 15 years of involvement in this community in a range of capacities, I argue that DeafBlind people are generating new and reciprocal modes of access to their environment, and this process is aligning language with context in novel ways. I discuss two mechanisms that can account for this process: embedding in the social field and deictic integration. I argue that together, these social and interactional processes yield a deictic system set to retrieve a restricted range of values from the extra-linguistic context, thereby attenuating the cognitive demands of intention attribution and narrowing the gap between DeafBlind minds.
(2014) From Compensation to Integration: The effects of the pro-tactile movement on the sub-lexical structure of Tactile American Sign Language
This article examines a divergence in the sublexical structure of Visual American Sign Language (VASL) and Tactile American Sign Language (TASL). My central claim is that TASL is a language, not just a relay for VASL. In order to make that case, I show how changes in the structure of interaction, driven by the aims of the ‘‘pro-tactile’’ social movement, contributed to a redistribution of complexity across grammatical sub-systems. I argue that these changes constitute a departure from the structure of VASL and the emergence of a new, tactile language. In doing so, I apprehend language emergence not as a ‘‘liberation’’ from context, but as a process of contextual integration.
(2014) Language Emergence in the Seattle DeafBlind Community (Dissertation)
This dissertation examines the social and interactional foundations of a grammatical divergence between Tactile American Sign Language (TASL) and Visual American Sign Language (VASL) in the Seattle DeafBlind community. I argue that as a result of the pro-tactile movement, structures of interaction have been reconfigured and a new language has be- gun to emerge. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research, more than 190 hours of videorecordings of interaction and language use, 50 interviews with members of the community, and more than 14 years of involvement in a range of capacities, I analyze this social transformation and its effect on the semiotic organization of TASL.
Training and Educational Resources
Protactile Linguistics
Protactile Experts Jelica Nuccio and John Lee Clark discuss recent research findings.
Protactile Principles
aj granda and Jelica Nuccio explain the core principles of protactile communication, provide background about how the principles were developed, and explain how they are intended to be used as an educational resource. Videos and text descriptions are provided to illustrate proper and improper application of the principles.
John Lee Clark
Notes from a DeafBlind Writer
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