In this book I aim at exploring and situating the concept of ‘embodiment’ on the map of research methodologies at a time when what counts as data in qualitative research is expanding. The book aims at systematising the current work on embodiment within migration studies and set it firmly in the field of qualitative data collection and analysis. Doing embodied research is crucial for deploying a non-invasive approach to working with research participants in vulnerable positions, such as, for instance, migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women, as will become evident through the theoretical stances and the application of embodied research in the course of the book.

Several grassroots organisations, including migrant and women's community and voluntary sector organisations in the UK, make use of embodied approaches to engage their service users through practices that involve the use of the body such as, for instance, yoga, gardening, meditation and dance. Very often these activities help new migrants break from the isolation of their own homes, especially women who tend to be the key beneficiaries of voluntary and community sector provision. Through the process of caring and being cared for, these bodily practices contribute to create forms of solidarity relying on mutual affect between community members. The bodily practices I have observed, and to an extent contributed to set in motion, during my work with migrant and women's VC (Voluntary and Community) sector organisations in London have been the inspiration to explore how research approaches and methodologies can be embodied and how research participants’ multiple identities are accounted for and engaged with during the research process.

Embodiment is defined in the online ‘Oxford Dictionaries. Language matters’ as ‘the representation or expression of something in a tangible or visible form’. According to Hudak et al ‘embodiment is the human experience of having and simultaneously being a body. The term conceptualises the body as a dynamic, organic site of meaningful experience rather than a physical object distinct from the self or mind’ (2007: 32). Embodiment has inspired several feminist scholars (Grosz, 1994; Probyn, 1996) in developing a framework that draws on Merleau-Ponty's work on the phenomenology of lived embodied existence in order to ‘understand the relations between conscious and nature, between interiority and exteriority’ (Grosz, 1994: 86) from a specifically feminist perspective.