Knowing as Moving: Perception, Memory, and Place - Softcover

Foster, Susan Leigh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478032146 ISBN 13: 9781478032144

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2025

Synopsis

In Knowing as Moving, Susan Leigh Foster theorizes how the act of moving in and through the world creates the potential for individual and collective bodies to connect. Starting from the assertion that knowing takes place through bodily movement, Foster moves away from the Western philosophical traditions of dance, critiquing the Cartesian mind/body duality and its colonizing politics. She draws on Native and Indigenous studies, ecological cognitive science, disability studies, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore how knowledge is neither static nor storable. Thinking is a physical action and the product of an entire neuromuscular system with its mobile postural and gestural configurations, perceptual systems, and brain activity. Foster outlines how reading, examining, talking, and remembering are all forms of moving and contends that any process of knowing establishes one’s identity and relationality. By focusing on the centrality of bodily movement to thought and self, she contributes a decolonial critique of the study of knowledge and being. In so doing, Foster replaces the Cartesian colonial “I think therefore I am,” with a decolonial “I move and therefore I know.”

About this title

About the Author

Susan Leigh Foster is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author, most recently, of Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478032146
• ISBN 13: 9781478032144
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168