The lived, material, and affective capacities through which bodies—human and nonhuman—sense, know, and compose within situated apparatuses, where learning and meaning emerge from patterned relations among flesh, tools, spaces, and concepts.
Embodiment in postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist work names the ongoing processes by which sensing and knowing happen through material arrangements. It emphasizes that cognition and creativity are not sealed inside minds but distributed across bodies, artifacts, environments, and temporal rhythms. Drawing on Donna Haraway, embodiment is never a private interiority; it is situated and partial, accountable to the concrete conditions that enable and constrain perception and action. In this vein, embodiment is a practice of worlding: bodies take shape with and through technologies, infrastructures, and discourses, and these relations contour what can be felt, articulated, and acted upon.
Agential realist and new materialist accounts (e.g., Karen Barad, Jane Bennett) make embodiment a matter of capacities and relations rather than properties of an isolated organism. Capacities shift with the apparatus: the lighting of a room, an interface’s latency, a keyboard’s tactility, an assessment rubric’s language, the hum of a server, or the pressure of a deadline—all participate in how writing is sensed and done. Affective theories (e.g., Sara Ahmed, Brian Massumi) clarify how feeling is not only inside a person, but circulates in encounters: atmospheres cohere around objects, texts, and interfaces, drawing bodies toward or away from possibilities. In composition and literacy studies informed by these orientations, embodiment becomes a way to account for the somatic, sensory, and rhythmic textures of composing: breath, posture, attention, fatigue, curiosity, surprise, and confidence are material forces in the craft of thinking on the page and screen.
A postqualitative focus on embodiment treats inquiry as situated participation, where the researcher’s own bodily attunements, tools, and habits are part of the apparatus that configures phenomena. Methods attend to how sensing happens: how a recording device shapes voice, how an interface shapes pace, how institutional spaces invite or suppress particular gestures of composing. Embodiment thus grounds analysis in material-discursive performativity, foregrounding how knowledge is enacted through practices of attention, movement, and affective orientation, and how ethical accountability is tied to the capacities a study amplifies or dampens.
Embodiment highlights how writing with LLMs is felt in the body and across the environment: the tempo of prompt-crafting, the tactile shift from drafting to curating model outputs, the micro-affects of friction and flow when hovering between windows, and the strain or relief in the shoulders and breath as responses appear. It clarifies how compositional judgment is shaped by interface affordances, latency jitters, autocomplete seductions, and the sensory cues of acceptance or error. It also reframes authorship as a choreography of capacities—reading, selecting, revoicing, citing, dis/attaching—co-composed by bodies, models, datasets, keyboards, screens, and policies. Instructors’ pedagogical decisions (for instance, designing warm-up practices that slow attention, allocating time for felt reflection after using a model, or arranging classroom furniture to support collaborative prompt work) become apparatus-tuning: interventions that cultivate or constrain the bodily and affective capacities through which students learn to write with AI.