Knowing as Moving: Perception, Memory, and Place

by Susan Leigh Foster

Overview

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478028901
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2025
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

"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

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