Protactile Working Group

Overview

Protactile (PT) is at once a language, a culture, and a movement. The movement has spent the past decade and a half reorienting DeafBlind life beyond the distantism of sighted and hearing norms, including the emergence and then rapid evolution of a new language in an unprecedented modality that uses touch as its primary means of expression. This movement is not against seeing and hearing ways. It is not content with finding little enclaves of access. It is about rethinking the whole question of what it can be to live in ways that don’t privilege the establishing shots of ableist presupposition. 

This working group will function as both an incubator for PT processes in and around Concordia, and as a beacon for PT practitioners elsewhere. There is no meeting place for PT in Canada yet, and such a site is necessary for a movement to begin, to take hold and spread its potential. We need PT reading groups, PT poetry readings, PT theatre, PT art walks, and other outings. Because PT makes shifts in the foundations of any field it comes into contact with, the potential research questions and creative projects are intensely rich and provocative, with implications and applications that extend across numerous scholarly disciplines within the academy, the DeafBlind community, and other communities.