Tēnā koe. Thank you for enrolling in this paper. I am delighted to be able to assist with your learning. The paper is designed to
strengthen your conceptual understanding of people, places, and power. We will do this by focusing on embodied geographies and
theoretical ideas from, for example, feminism, poststructuralism, 'more-than-human', decolonial, Māori and queer studies. These ideas
help inform a wide range of research topics that will assist your future studies, as well as preparing you for work place dynamics,
sustainable and liveable lives. There are opportunities to build up a knowledge base that is aligned to your own area of interest. Focusing on the
body helps us to make sense of a variety of places and power relations. We will interpret, delve deeper, and seek different possibilities.

The subject of embodiment has been part of gender and feminist geographers' research agendas for more than three decades. The
paper begins with an introduction to various theories (such as phenomenology, poststructuralism, feminism, intersectionality, and
psychoanalysis) on the body. The objective is to examine how and why geographers and other social scientists have become interested
in the body. We address such questions as: what is the specificity of geographers’ perspective on the body? In what ways do bodies
construct places and vice versa?

Following this we analyse a number of specific aspects of embodiment including sexed and gendered bodies, body size and shape,
home bodies, bodies at work, young bodies, ‘racialised’ bodies, sporting bodies, (dis)abled bodies, animal bodies
and the end of the body – dying and death. During each of the sessions we will focus attention on the ways in which ‘place matters’ (whether it be
online places or material places) to bodies, that is, the mutually constituted relationship between bodies and places.