Touching, Tinkering, and Manipulating: Bodily Engagement When Reading for Academic Purposes and Why It Matters

ABSTRACT Reading for academic purposes in higher education is a complex activity involving the use of various text types and formats, and readers interact with different objects such as laptops, tablets, paper formats, and writing tools. Such interactions entail embodied engagement: readers engage their bodies, especially their hands and fingers, to touch the reading surface, turn the page or scroll, tinker with a pen, and manipulate the texts. Yet, little attention has been given to the role of the reader's body during reading. This study suggests that bodily activities contribute to the ongoing reading processes, and the study asks: how do embodied, hands‐on engagement with objects—through touch, tinkering, and manipulation—shape real‐time, situated reading practices? We draw on data from a larger qualitative study to analyze embodied engagement during graduate students' naturalistic reading activities. Extensive video data is used to describe the readers' bodily enactment of ongoing reading processes, and we demonstrate and discuss how the interaction between reader and objects is shaped by the affordances in the physical objects. The analysis reveals how potential bodily activities vary because objects afford different ways of engaging with them. We conclude that graduate students' reading for academic purposes is an activity where the body plays a key role, and that embodied engagement with objects can both benefit and restrain students' reading. Integrating embodied and distributed perspectives on cognition with reading research can strengthen our understanding of naturalistic reading activities, and embodied engagement should be acknowledged as an important factor in reading.