Introduction: Body of Evidence and the Corporeal Turn in Journalism Studies

This introduction to the special issue, “Body of Evidence and the Corporeal Turn in Journalism Studies”, argues for a corporeal turn in journalism, highlighting bodies as a constitutive yet under-theorised dimension through which journalistic knowledge and practice are produced, experienced, and understood. While journalists’ bodies are central to reporting through sensory engagement, emotional labour, and physical presence, they have often been treated as incidental, problematic, or merely functional rather than as objects of inquiry in their own right. Against this backdrop, and through a critical engagement with debates about objectivity, embodiment, and situated knowledge, this introduction argues that attending to bodies in journalism offers important epistemological and ontological insights for the field. Bodies in journalism – understood here as multiple, differentiated, and processual – shape how journalistic knowledge is produced, experienced, and valued. Far from being marginal, embodied perspectives highlight core tensions within journalism and are increasingly relevant in technological, institutional, and cultural contexts marked by precarity, visibility, and change.