Embodiment and literacies

The development of this ebook overlapped with a pandemic that continues to shake the world, reminding us of the interdependence of humans and nonhumans, of bodies, objects, and entities. In these last months, our material bodies have been abruptly threatened by illness, physically distanced, and reconfigured in virtual spaces that shone a glaring spotlight onto long-known social and economic inequities. Close to the completion of this project, as the Black Lives Matter movement continues to swell and collide with existing social structures and systemic inequities, that spotlight has called attention to the ways certain types of bodies are dehumanized through daily microaggressions and outright violence. Although we have been writing about bodies for nearly ten years, when we proposed this ebook, we believed our theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical promotion of embodiment and literacies was still a nascent concern to the vast majority of educators around the world. Globally mobile youth, bodies stuck in refugee camps and in-between borders, youth transacting with scripted curricula and alienating textbooks, and teachers having to navigate curricular changes that governed their bodies and the teaching body (Kontovourki et al. 2015)--all made the examination of bodies relevant and necessary. We did not expect that in a matter of months, bodies everywhere would be redirected into virtual spaces, covered in masks and gloves for everyday transactions, remain uncovered as declarations of autonomy and repudiation of communal practice and wellbeing, discriminated against more overtly, weaponized, and feared. We did not expect bodies to rise to such a prominent place in global discourse, though it is clear to us that bodies have always been sites of vulnerability and resistance, both ontologically and materially. For many, the realization that our bodies are not immune to rampant contagion, nor are we past the practice of judging a body's skin color, has once again destabilized what was assumed to be true or established. Silent and vibrant, bodies have always been the material entity through which we experience the world, citing institutional histories of injustice and inequity in accessing social goods and services. The COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement remind us that, across the globe, bodies continually negotiate recognition and struggle to matter. And so, we write this introduction to a ebook reiterating a long-held assumption: Bodies matter.