Knowing As Moving: Perception, Memory, and Place

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.”