Acknowledgements

We are indebted beyond measure to the contributors to this collection. Thank you for sharing your important scholarship and for your patience with the editorial process. We deeply value your work and have truly enjoyed our collaboration throughout this project. A special thanks to Lisa Myers for her beautiful artwork that graces the cover of the book.

Athabasca University Press has provided tremendous support for this book project. We are sincerely grateful to Pamela Holway, senior editor, who championed the collection from the start and who took time to give each chapter of the book the benefits of her editorial expertise and scholarly training. Her constructively critical attention resulted in significant improvements to the collection as a whole. We also thank Joyce Hildebrand for her reflective engagement with the text during the copyediting process. Our heartfelt thanks as well to Megan Hall and Karyn Wisselink for their collaborative approach to creating the cover design and promoting the book. We were thrilled to receive an Awards to Scholarly Publications Program (ASPP) grant for this book, and we thank the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for their support.

Sheila. Renita, I am grateful for your scholarly expertise, administrative finesse, and deep commitment to our project. Your wise guidance throughout Roxana’s illness and death, and then your support during my pregnancy the following year, made it possible for me to continue this work. Thank you for our many conversations about lived experience and being present with body, breath, emotions, and spirit with respect to writing, loss, babies, animals, photography, walks, and, academic work. Editing this collection with you has been an honour and a pleasure.

I studied with exceptional OISE/UT scholars at a time when critical race, anticolonial, and decolonizing scholarship faced particular forms of institutional opposition, many of which persist and continue to be resisted. I am indebted to my teachers Roxana Ng, George J. Sefa Dei, and Sherene Razack and to my peers who have made invaluable contributions to critical scholarship: I write with you all in mind and do my best to keep up!

My gratitude to Roxana is multifold. She was a challenging and supportive doctoral supervisor and a trusted mentor. She was also a delightful person with whom to collaborate on a book project, and I’m sure that she would be as overjoyed as I am now that it has come to fruition. I remember the two of us sitting in Roxana’s backyard, working together on the book and laughing when she suddenly exclaimed, “This is fun!” Working with Roxana was fun: she approached her scholarly and community work with meticulous concentration as well as enthusiasm and curiosity. I miss her dearly.

Soraya, thank you for writing and phone tea.

Prasad, Soumil, and Rushil: love and thanks every day.

Renita. My deep gratitude goes to Roxana Ng for her support, mentorship, and friendship throughout my doctoral years and subsequent academic career. Her move to reclaim Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a system of knowledge from her (and my own) cultural roots, affirmed my way of being and of knowing, which likewise insists on the fundamental integration of the body-heart-mind-spirit. Her courage in bringing TCM from the margins into the academy and placing it at the centre of her teaching and scholarship inspired me to push the boundaries of critical scholarship as I pursued my research into mindfulness as a decolonizing embodied pedagogy rooted in Buddhist onto-epistemology.

Sheila, my heartfelt thanks to you for inviting me to join this book project following Roxana’s untimely passing. Your thorough knowledge of the literature on embodiment and your vigorous engagement with Indigenous scholarship have brought my own work in these areas to a new level. At every stage of this project, your insightful input always moved the book toward greater depth and complexity, while your thoughtful idea of gathering the contributors together in conversation made the process of editing this book a concrete experience of embodiment in relations.

A lotus bow and hugs to my dharma-sister, Marisela Gomez, for our sharing in heart and spirit over the years about our mindfulness practice in social justice work. Thank you for your clear observation in your reading of my chapter in this book. My gratitude and love to Mino and Mudita, my feline family, for their calming companionship and for showing me the power of being grounded in the body and the grace of life in unison with nature, a state from which we humans have grown distant and to which we must return.