Touch the Future, John Lee Clark
Touch the Future, John Lee Clark
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Touch the Future
A Manifesto in Essays

Author: John Lee Clark

Narrator: Perry Daniels

Unabridged: 5 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/17/2023


Synopsis

A revelatory collection of essays on the DeafBlind experience, and a manifesto on the power and untapped potential of touch.

Born Deaf into an ASL-speaking family and blind by adolescence, John Lee Clark learned to embrace the possibilities of his tactile world. He is on the frontlines of the Protactile movement, which gave birth to an unprecedented tactile language and a way of life based on physical connection.

In a series of paradigm-shifting essays, Clark reports on seismic developments within the DeafBlind community. In "Against Access," he interrogates the prevailing advocacy for "accessibility" that recreates a shadow of a hearing-sighted experience. In the National Magazine Award–winning "Tactile Art," he describes his relationship to visual art and encounters with tactile sculpture. He advocates for "Co-Navigation," a new way of guiding that respects DeafBlind agency and offers a brief history of the term "DeafBlind." As warm and witty as he is radical and inspiring, Clark welcomes listeners into the exciting Protactile landscape and celebrates the hidden knowledge that can be gained through touch.

About John Lee Clark

John Lee Clark is an award-winning writer and Protactile educator. He has received the Krause Essay Prize and a National Magazine Award for his prose, and the Minnesota Book Award for his poetry collection How to Communicate. A 2021-2023 Bush Fellow, he lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with his partner, the ASL Deaf artist Adrean Clark, their three kids, and two cats.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Anlan

Clark's essay collection on the DeafBlind experience touched on this community's history, issues of "access", art and theatre, relationship to deaf and blind communities, and more. Clark is an excellent writer. His voice is original and unfettered. He is also quite funny. I highly recommend to every......more

Goodreads review by Amanda

It was a unique read for me. As an educator, I'm always trying to reach a very wide audience. It makes sense that a DeafBlind person should teach DeafBlind children. I agree with this up until they reach a higher level of content. Then subject matter experts with a Protactile interpreter should be u......more

Goodreads review by Peter

Whoa. What a paradigm-shifting, eye-opening, enlightening and enlarging book. While this is an extremely focused and convincing manifesto for the Protactile language of the DeafBlind, it is also (for one hearing and sighted) a kind and startling alert about other ways of intelligence, and has deep r......more

Goodreads review by Nancy

This is the book I’ve been waiting for. These essays by John Lee Clark make the case for DeafBlind people setting the agenda and making decisions about what access means for them, since the current ways of doing things regularly fail them. Clark is one of the creators of ProTactile, a form of signin......more