What can be learned from a story woven out of fragmented moments of joy, pain, horror, and blissful awareness? Flesh Mapping is an attempt to create a pedagogy of shared narrative, place, and politics; to narratively map the injuries of the material, emotional, and spiritual impact of poverty, displacement, hunger and war on an individual life. The book is an invitation to instructors in education, anthropology, women’s studies, and labor studies to re-imagine education as the praxis for liberation, renewal, and hope. It serves as a process of naming the injuries inflicted on real bodies by privilege and power, like sites on a map. The goal is not simply to name and make visible privilege but to simultaneously create emergent spaces of dissonance in education that can challenge and transform power at the site where the personal is political.

Sylvia L. Richardson is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She is the host and producer of the internationally syndicated radio program Latin Waves and serves as the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC)’s Vice President for North America.