The overarching theme of this volume grew out of The Roots and Branches of Interpretive Sociology: Cultural, Pragmatist, and Psychosocial Approaches, a conference organized and chaired by Thomas DeGloma and Julie B. Wiest that took place over the course of two days immediately preceding the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. The conference, which was sponsored by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, the Psychosocial Scholars Group, and Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology, brought together scholars from across the globe working in the traditions of American pragmatism, cultural and cognitive sociology, psychoanalytic sociology, semiotics, symbolic interactionism, and other schools of thought. The range of interpretive approaches represented in the conference program offered a unique opportunity for investigating the conjunctions and disjunctions between each tradition's respective approach to grasping the meaning and matter of social life.

Serving as a member of the Conference Programming Committee, Anne Marie Champagne, a doctoral student and junior fellow at Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology, co-organized (with Piper Sledge) a featured thematic panel, The Fine Lines of Interpreting Bodies and Identities, which set out to explore how bodies and embodied identities are presented, represented, and interpreted in the social sciences. The panel title gave a nod to Eviatar Zerubavel's book The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1991), a study of the sociomental processes of differentiation, association, and perception that partition reality into islands of meaning. Alongside panel presentations on auditory perception and attributions of value (Whitney Johnson) and the embodied aesthetics of far-right extremism (Cynthia Miller-Idriss), Asia Friedman, a former student of Zerubavel, presented an overview of her research highlighting a cultural cognitive vision for the social construction of the body. She specifically emphasized selective attention as a key cultural cognitive process that links meaning with materiality and plays a significant role in the social construction of the body. Her cultural cognitive approach is reflected in this volume's broader focus on interpretation as a uniquely valuable approach for advancing the study of the body as a simultaneously material and semiotic entity.