A01=Susan Leigh Foster
affordances
archipelago
Author_Susan Leigh Foster
Cartesian
Category=ATQ
Category=ATY
Category=JBSL11
Category=JHM
chaparral
connectedness
decolonial
duality
ecological cognitive science
embodied
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
grid
kinesthesia
knowing
memory
movement
proprioception
relationality
social experiences of walking
Product details
- ISBN 9781478032144
- Weight: 445g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Aug 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.”
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.
