The theme of QRM 2012, and hence this ebook, was Embodiment, Imagination and Meaning. As researchers everything we do is concerned explicitly and implicitly with meaning - meanings of actions, intentions, texts, words, gestures, theories, and so on. However, making meaning is not just an academic or an intellectual activity, it is, as in the epigraph quote, an integral part of life. Meaning making is fundamentally embodied because there is never a time when we are not a sensate being in the world. The themes of language, the body, and emotion play through the work of the two Conference Keynote speakers, Mark Johnson and Karen Lee Ashcraft. Both, in different ways, have challenged traditional ways of conceptualizing and studying the process of meaning-making, and brought forward the body as a site through and on which meaning is made.