The ‘corporeal turn’ towards embodied knowledge provides an opportunity for practitioners and theorists between the arts and sciences to engage with a vast range of practice-based research methodologies. Both the scholarly impact and the potential challenge of Kinesthetic Empathy is due to the ambitious interdisciplinary and cross-methodological range of the edited volume. Empathy and the affect of embodied performance are explored and interrogated between wide-ranging theoretical and practical frameworks from neuroscience and philosophy to varied practical applications of embodiment (and disembodiment) through dance, theatre, photography, music, film and applied performance. Dee Reynolds articulates the form and function of kinesthetic empathy, ‘as a movement across and between bodies, which, in an artistic situation, can have affective impact with potential to change modes of perception and ways of knowing’ (p. 88). The focus on the ‘potential to change modes of perception and ways of knowing’ is a key area of inquiry throughout the book.

Reynolds and co-author Matthew Reason provide editorial introductions in five main parts that are based on ideas of affect, communication, epistemology, motor systems and skills and participation. Several chapter contributions enhance the nuanced reading of empathy, whether based on the ontological separation between filmic visual and internal bodies (D’Aloia), the role of witnessing and the mimetic power of empathic engagement through dance (Meekums), or the ontological function of empathy in relation to recognizing otherness within the self (Parekh-Gaihede). Additional informative applications include the association between digitization and kinesthetic empathy on remote bodies and environments. Both Reynolds and Reason rightly address ethical constraints and the limits of empathy in relation to circumventing otherness and the potential to collapse self into other.

Reynolds and Reason close with a series of questions regarding the functionality of kinesthetic empathy for rehabilitation, how spaces might be constructed to inform kinesthetic empathy, and the limits of kinesthetic empathy when manipulated by adverse power networks. The book offers a progressive awareness of how kinesthetic empathy can evolve varied disciplines, whether through mirror neuron research using puppetry with autistic youth (Shaughnessy) or through the use of stillness as a reflective practice (Gray). Both scholars and practitioners can benefit from the project's illuminating engagement with practice-based research.