Sensuous Knowledge

Friday 12. December at 18:00 - 21:00 CEST

Online

How can we connect to plural ways of knowing?

Minna Salami is a Nigerian-Finnish and Swedish feminist author and social critic, who investigates how our views and actions are influenced by what she refers to as europatriarchal thinking. In her works she is rediscovering ways of seeing, experiencing and shaping the world that are “kaleidoscopic", "multiperspectival", "anti-dogmatic", "non-dualist", "feminist", "expansive", "plural". She calls it sensuous knowledge –– a multi-perspectival, non-hierarchical, and embodied approach to knowledge. It is knowledge that involves not only the mind and the intellect, but also affect, the senses, art, dreams, Nature, embodiment, spirituality, and the idea of oneself as part of a larger whole. She positions knowledge as a living entity, “as something that you have a relationship with, rather than as something that is static, and rigid, and that you accumulate.”

For her this kind of poetic, participatory knowing brings us in a deeper connectedness with the world: “With sensuous knowledge, you have an ongoing intimate relationship with knowledge, almost like you would with a lover. Things are forever changing and growing and transforming and sometimes dying, and you realize, oh, this knowledge is no longer of service. Collectively, too, we can come to a place where we might say, OK, this knowing this, this body of knowing that, this particular part of social thought and social life is no longer very useful. We have to either reimagine it, or adapt it, or discard it entirely. Sensuous knowledge is really about having a very open mind as you navigate the world.”

This form of knowing is in stark contrast to our dominant way of knowing in Western culture: “I argue that the type of approach to knowledge that we have today is Europatriarchal knowledge. What Europatriarchal knowledge typically does is to divide, to create a distinction between the political and the aesthetic. The political includes science, analysis, statistics, and politics. The aesthetic includes nature, the body, feelings, emotions, the senses, art, and poetry. And Euro-patriarchal knowledge divides these two, in order to create societies that can be controlled, and in which everything can be placed in fragmented departments. Sensuous knowledge, by contrast, is a worldview and a way of being in the world in which there isn't a distinction between those things. And sensuous knowledge is also non-hierarchical, synthesizing and inclusive, pluralistic, indigenous, friendly, feminist, therapeutic, art-inspired, and imminent. It is Earth-based.“

In our evolve LIVE! seminar we will explore with Mina Salami this deeper way of knowing, how we can cultivate it and how it changes our being in the world. We will also deepen the process of dialogue as one practice of co-thinking and co-creating to move into this way of knowing. 

emerge bewusstseinskultur e.V.

office@emerge-bk.de