Terra Edwards is a linguistic anthropologist interested in the existential and environmental foundations of language. Broadly, her research asks how different ways of being in the world give rise to different kinds of languages. Since 2006, she has been pursuing this interest in DeafBlind communities, where new protactile ways of being have emerged alongside a new protactile language. In grappling with those processes as they unfold, she has turned to theories and methods grounded in socio-cultural anthropology, linguistics, ecological semiotics, existential phenomenology, cognitive science, pragmatics, and the study of interaction. She was the 2025 recipient of the International Pragmatics Association’s Innovation Award. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation and has been published in Language, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Frontiers in Psychology, Language in Society, and other venues.