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Knowing as Moving
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Starting from the assertion that knowing takes place through bodily movement, Susan Leigh Foster theorizes how the act of moving in and through the world creates the potential for individual and co...
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15 August 2025

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.”
Price: $23.95
Pages: 176
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Publication Date:
15 August 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781478032144
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
“Susan Leigh Foster demonstrates the superb bounty of thinking-as-moving in connectedness to the worlds that surround us. Knowing as Moving elaborates how continued engagement with study reveals worlds beyond worlds of ways to be with ideas in motion. Shimmering with insights gleaned from an exquisite ability to move ideas toward each other, Foster proves again that dancing supports the being-in-time that humans must engage in to participate in the urgent processes of life.”—Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor of Performance Studies and Theatre, Northwestern University
"Susan Leigh Foster is preeminent in dance studies and one of the germinal architects of the field’s successful emergence. Knowing as Moving will count among one of my personal favorites in Foster’s incredibly impressive oeuvre for the bravery and grace with which she takes on the task of thinking ever more laterally through and away from the very same Western philosophy and movement traditions in which she has come up. A broad, beautiful, smart, and timely book.”—Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
"Susan Leigh Foster is preeminent in dance studies and one of the germinal architects of the field’s successful emergence. Knowing as Moving will count among one of my personal favorites in Foster’s incredibly impressive oeuvre for the bravery and grace with which she takes on the task of thinking ever more laterally through and away from the very same Western philosophy and movement traditions in which she has come up. A broad, beautiful, smart, and timely book.”—Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
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.
Setting Out by Looking Back ix
Essaying 1
Walking as Place-Making 13
Being, Knowing, and Acting 36
Embodying the Decolonial 56
Remembering Dancing 78
Dancing’s Affordances 97
Continuing On . . . 121
Notes 123
Bibliography 139
Index 151
Essaying 1
Walking as Place-Making 13
Being, Knowing, and Acting 36
Embodying the Decolonial 56
Remembering Dancing 78
Dancing’s Affordances 97
Continuing On . . . 121
Notes 123
Bibliography 139
Index 151