Sensuous Knowledge - A Conversation with Minna Salami

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Reality is far more than our worldviews, our philosophies, but those are nevertheless such major influences on how we shape reality. And for, you know, millennia, our collective realities and our social imaginaries have been shaped by a very particular way of knowing.

Hi everyone.

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. There's a lot of talk in education about this strange thing called knowledge, and it's always been a bit of a battleground in educational conversation. For example, in lots of loud calls for knowledge-rich curricula. Personally, I'm very much in favor of knowledge and knowing. I love it. In fact, it's part of the buzz that I get of following the curiosity and the inquiry of learning. It's just the kind of knowledge and knowing that we've been conditioned to value over others that I have an issue with. So this week, I'm so incredibly happy to be able to share this conversation with Minna Salami, who has been deeply challenging this hierarchy of knowing through her extensive work and amazing concept and book of the same title, Sensuous Knowledge. Her work coming from the deep tradition of African feminism is to trouble the hierarchies, not simply to invert them. Minna is a Nigerian, Finnish, and Swedish feminist, author, social critic, and currently program chair at the New Institute. She's the author of Can Feminism Be African? forthcoming, and Sensuous 'Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone.' And she also has an amazing blog that you can find at missafropolitan.com.

Right, well, thank you, Mena. I'm totally excited to have this conversation. It's been a while in the making, and I feel more and more this is such an important conversation I'm having in various different ways with different people. I guess the question I'm kind of holding is all the different ways that we know the world and how so many of them are not given space in an education system which prioritizes a particular type of knowledge or a particular way of knowing, particular kind of Euro patriarchal knowledge to use some of the language that you use. But no, firstly, thank you so much for having this conversation and taking the time to, to share some of these ideas. So I, I think it's incredibly important questions for educators right now.

Well, thank you. It's really such a pleasure to, to join you in what I agree is a really important space to continue to expand where we can explore these multiple ways of knowing that so can enrich our individual and collective lives.

Amazing. I mean, just by way of a bit of context setting for people, perhaps you could, could you just give a little bit of a sense of, because I've understood from reading your work that your own personal story is interwoven with these kinds of ways of holding multiple ways of knowing the world together. And so perhaps, yeah, it might be lovely for people just to get a bit of a sense of how that relates to where you, where your story has come from.

Yes. I mean, I guess to an extent, I think that is precisely the point, that the ways that we come to perceive knowledge is interwoven with our personal stories, even though we are living in a world where the convention is to kind of deny that. But for me, it is, feels, uh, very relevant and particularly important that I did arrive at this, what I call sensuous knowledge, which is a kind of paradigm of knowing that I'm proposing and building upon through my personal story, insofar that my personal story has been one where I am really drawn and consumed by definitions of power. And so what I mean by that is being of African heritage, being a Black person, being a female person, and of course, many other layers, but, you know, just in terms of identity, the question of power of who has it and why they have it is not one that I've ever been able to evade, as long as I wanted to live a life in which I was autonomous and was able to express myself freely and feel empowered. And the question of power is probably the bigger driving question for me than the question of knowledge, per se. But because I've been so consumed by understanding power and and pushing back against the rigid definitions of it and the manipulation of it, of course, I arrived at a point where it became clear to me that we cannot change power structures unless we expand and transform knowledge systems, our epistemic and ontological systems. So yeah, that's kind of how this question became so central to me, and now perhaps is the even more central one than power in a sense.

Yeah, no, amazing. And I would love to talk to you about power, cuz I think that reading your, you know, writing about rivers and things, it really actually helped me to see and understand power in a different way that I had never thought about before. So it's almost like a knowing of power through your writing. I, so I'd love to talk about that if we can, but maybe if we can just, one of the things you say in the book, it's cuz you've brought in sensuous knowledge and that's the title of the book, that it disrupts one-dimensional thinking and contributes to a more vibrant understanding of the world. And I think that, that just jumped out to me as a nice phrase that I feel it strongly about the way that we educate young people is that is a very flattened, one-dimensional, superficial sense of the world, right? And it's like we, we ignore their interiority or their, their personal stories, or we, we'd like to say we don't ignore them. I think, you know, we might take them seriously in chats in the, on the side of the classroom or at break time or whatever. But actually the thing that gets centered in the, the education system is not that, right? It's like that's a, of a secondary value to to this thing that is somehow objective, thing-based, rational. And, and I've heard you somewhere also talk about that your Yoruba connections and epistemologies from your Nigerian background also was somehow reflected in the idea of sensuous knowledge as well. So I think it feels like you've lived multiple ways of knowing culturally as you've grown up, and it just felt like there was, there was a lot of resonance there in the, as we think about holding these different ways of knowing. Together. So perhaps you could say a bit more about what this idea of sensuous knowledge might mean, and then maybe we can talk about it in the context of education.

Yeah. What I want to start by doing is addressing the, the first thing about the one-dimensional way of knowing, which I think we both agree we can sort of see when we look at our educational systems is the case, even with these kind of additions of, um, a personal touch. And so the first thing to understand about that is that we encourage a one-dimensional way of knowing because it makes people more easy to control. It makes people more predictable. Because I don't want to— what I want to say is that our educational system and our governance systems, our political systems, our global order, are far more connected than we assume that they are. You know, I think we analyze and criticize and explore connections between politics and social relations, gender dynamics, racial dynamics, maybe even like economic dynamics, all of these things, to a far greater extent than we do explore this connection to our educational system. It is so ingrained, you know, we just assume and take for granted that our educational system is somehow neutral. So I want to just frame, you know, lay the foundation to say that it isn't neutral. It is. And it's, I'm not even saying that it is tied to a political agenda. I'm just it is tied to the worldview, to the ontological perception of how the world should operate. And that is one which has over time, you know, it's not even necessarily intentionally, but it has really come to be one in which the idea is that the human animal, the human being, our experiences should be controlled and sort of tamed so that we become part of this functional society that has been created in a very specific way. And so that is why it is so one-dimensional, because people who think one-dimensionally can be more easily controlled. Now, the second point that you made, that there are these attempts to sort of show care for students and like maybe on the side talk with them about their personal lives and like that approach is exactly the thing that I am opposing or that I am critiquing and that I think is a, a dangerous approach because it creates these hierarchies, right, of how, you know, we, we should think about life and lived experience, in which there's the kind of seriousness and the gravitas of like what you do in the classroom or an adult in, in your office or whatever, and then the rest is sort of secondary. But of course, in an actual human life, and consequently in the way that we structure our societies, which is made up of human lives coming together in social interaction, that is not the reality. You know, we, we place just as much, if not more importance on the stuff that we come in conventional education allocate to the fringes.

Yeah.

And so we, we kind of are missing such a, an opportunity, such a platform to expand our prisms. So the idea with sensuous knowledge, which can be expressed in many ways, but in this context, it's really to synthesize the two. So to, to. To disturb this hierarchy and to insist that a holistic and a deeper, wiser education is one in which these two and many, many other layers of being are not put in a hierarchy or in some kind of dualism, but rather are seen as having equal value, equal sort of intrinsic value to what it means to become an educated person, being. And then in terms of— in Yoruba cosmology, so Yoruba is an ethnic group in present-day Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and then of course very widely spread across the diaspora. And it's one of the biggest ethnic groups in the African continent. And our traditional or indigenous knowledge system, which is called Ifa and is a kind of philosophical system, within that system, the word for knowledge is ogbon. And there's a story around— so ogbon is not— it's the word for knowledge, but it's also a divinity. So knowledge is a divinity in Ifa. And that means that it has, you know, it's an— it's alive, it's a kind of almost like a breathing entity, you know, that is fluid and shifting and intimate. And so there's this creation story, as all sort of cosmologies have. And in the Yoruba creation story, when God gave people ogbon, meaning knowledge, they divided ogbon into two. And so there's ogbon inu and ogbon ori. And ogbon inu translated is knowledge of the gut, and ogbon ori is knowledge of the head. So we're talking about what we would call intellectual knowledge or IQ or something like that, versus emotional knowledge. And in the Yoruba story, the gods gave these two and said, to have only one of them is to be only part-wise. And the idea was for individuals and for society to sort of integrate the two. And this really, in a sense, you know, if I were to— I mean, I could almost not have written Sensuous Knowledge and just share this story because that's precisely what it's about, about this kind of embodiment of Ogbon Inu and all of what that entails, because it's not just intuition or emotional intent, it's the combination of those things. And Ogbon Ori, and likewise, embrace all of what that entails— philosophy, reasoning, logic, rationality, like, you know, all of them. And the very idea that one embodies those two disrupts and cancels out the idea that there should be a hierarchy between these two, because who wants a hierarchy within themselves? Who wants to embody— but that is exactly what we do in conventional education. So we are kind of like as humans who are walking around with a deep conflict within us.

Yeah.

And that, of course, then leads to so many of the conflicts that we also see play out externally, societally. And so that's why the story, I think, is so important and beautiful, because it just very pointedly— and, you know, it being positioned as something that goes back to the very creation of the universe, Tells us how incredibly important it is to not have a hierarchy and to give equal value to these different ways of knowing.

Yeah. Oh, it's amazing. And it, it just, it feels so resonant with so many different conversations that I've been having, the, the sense that what we are kind of grasping around for as we think about how does it, how might education shift and change to respond to the moments we're in, it's just not a kind of, we can't engineer some superficial kind of policy shift that so-called transforms education. And so much of the things that are happening, the questions that are being asked are really quite fundamental in the sense of really going back down to what does it really mean to inhabit your body, the world, and come to know the world. And for myself, having felt it, having been swimming in this system that does prioritize a particular way, it does set up the hierarchy and it very much prioritizes is a particular way that, as you say, you internalize that. So as you were speaking, I was just thinking, well, I definitely don't take as seriously certain parts of my knowing as others, right? Very definitely. I mean, it's, you know, I will suppress the emotional and I will kind of try and center the rational decision-making, so-called part of myself, cuz that's just this conditioned way that I've been taught to inhabit. Well, you might, might feel some things in your body about this, but they're not really to be taken seriously. Not really. You know, and it's, I mean, I think there's something about masculinity and maleness there that may, that I'd love to get onto with your work in Black feminism. But, but I think there's also just, as you say, we have been kind of conditioned in this particular set of hierarchies about what we should really take seriously about how the world is and works. That is really fundamentally based on a particular ontology and epistemology. And it's like, those are, those are really big questions to ask educators who are just like cracking on trying to do their work in a school, right?

Completely. And, you know, this, this hierarchy that we all are conditioned to embody is a very gendered one indeed. So, you know, you, what you're describing quite possibly has something to do with your gender. For many women, it might be the opposite, where they might be blocking out the Ogbon Ori, You know, they may have been taught to create a hierarchy whereby the emotional or intuitive side has a higher position. And this, I need to make it very clear, because there's this risk then that we enter like some kind of essentialism. And I'm saying that women are more emotional.

Sure.

That's the whole point, that we are not, but we are conditioned to think that we are on either end of this hierarchy. And, you know, generally speaking, we therefore, in a gendered way, end up diminishing a way of knowing that is so central to our flourishing, to our, you know, eudaimonia, as Aristotle might have said. And, and so it's really, really so huge, I think, to consider this, because it also then impacts the relations that we have. This is why we have such problems in patriarchy, because we are communicating from very different registers. And of course, you know, if you're a man, or— and actually, the feminist Gloria Steinem, she says how she got to a point where she, she got tired of being so masculine. So the thing is that, you know, because we've also assigned more value to the masculine, women also, and perhaps sometimes even more than men, really hone in on this rational— I know I've done that in my life, like, you know, and I've— like, Gloria Steinem's line resonated so much with me, because when I read it, I thought, oh, God, I am also so tired of trying to prove my masculinity, you know. And so we're kind of depending on where we're coming at from this, it becomes so impossible to communicate.

Yeah.

So we're these like walking embodiments of conflict. And of course, this applies across class, race, and like all of the different ways. Absolutely.

Yeah. And the thing, I mean, the thing I find so interesting is then to historically situate that the people designing all those institutions, but I mean, you know, in many ways, educational gatherings or interactions have been happening since we've been around as a species, but the particular modern institutions that we're now so trapped in and so limited by were designed at a particular moment by men largely. And so written into the codes and the success criteria and all these, you know, however you wanna describe it, but you know, it's in the walls of all of the institutions, right? Is this hierarchy, right? Is this particular prioritizing of this is how you are successful in this space. And it's defined by some of the blueprints that originally were designed by late 19th century and sometimes pretty dark individuals with the rise of eugenics at that time. And you know, there was, we, we're still dealing with all those ghosts, right? And then people don't like to talk about it, but we really are, right? I think. And that's why I find that the critical voices from, for example, yours coming from Black feminism, and, you know, but all of these critical voices are so important. This is not some kind of rise of wokeism, and, you know, that people can easily dismiss. This is a fundamental kind of questioning.

Well, it's not like— imagine we were each born, and at the moment of our birth, we were given this huge book, you know, Bible, the title of the book was something like The World, okay, like, or Life, or, you know, The Meaning of Life, let's say. And then you looked at the chapters, and let's just call it Life, the title of the book, Life, Life according to white men, life according to black men, black women, so on and so forth, life according to nature, you know, like, let's say, you know, we were really given this. What we've been doing is kind of like if everybody was given this book, but we said, no, we're not going to read the other 500 chapters, we're only going to read this one that is life according to white male elite people from Europe. And we're going to structure almost everything around that for centuries. Then the moment somebody says, hey, but look, there's another chapter, let's read, then we start accusing them of being woke or being this or that. And actually, what we should see is that what is when, you know, when voices that have not been heard in the past, when the feminist movement arose, when, you know, indigenous knowledge is now having its moment, what we should be able to perceive is that we're being given a gift to like to see, read the other chapters, because they will enrich our understanding rather than just narrowly focusing on one. And of course, there are a lot of very positive things in that chapter. I mean, there's some amazing things in that chapter. Nobody is saying, or at least nobody should be saying, that let's tear out the pages of that chapter because we've been reading it for too long. No, there's stuff that's good. There's a lot of stuff there that we maybe should question. But it's kind of like that. And so, yeah, I think it's wonderful, you know, what you're doing and what you're advocating for and what hopefully is starting to ripple into education now, because of course this is like the most important realm. This is where we change the future.

No, I hope so. I mean, yeah, you don't get to choose what you do in a way, right? You just do what feels important. But, but yeah, I think it's so important. Now. So just practically, I loved it. I loved watching your— you've got this new film, Black Feminism and the Poly Crisis. I'd really recommend people watch because, you know, again, it's quite an easy thing to ignore that chapter, right? Or you don't, you don't know anything about that chapter, or you, you know, you have to go looking for that chapter because it's just not in the mainstream textbooks or, you know, whatever. And I think I'm conscious of, you know, this, the centering of one thing. And then I've heard you talk one not wanting to make things alternative to this, you get tied up in knots of all of that. But I think perhaps you could speak about where the— your intention behind the film. And I just more and more I see in relation to the polycrisis, we need to look in many, many other places for responses. And like, for example, Professor Imedjulu in the film talks about the problem of imagination.

I mean, the first thing I want to say is, so in Centrist Knowledge in the book, I write about how I don't see centrist knowledge as alternative, quote unquote, alternative. And I mean, I wrote the book, you know, it's 4 years since it was published, 5, 6 years since I wrote it. And I probably have changed my mind about that. I think what I meant was, because alternative can be used in different ways. And quite often, when people say, oh, this is alternative, they're centering the norm, and maybe validating it even more and positioning other thing as lesser than somehow. It's alternative, it's not quite as important. That definition of alternative is the one that I reject. But an alternative, I think, can also be exciting, you know, something that is revivifying because it awakens, you know, gives us a new lens on things. So, so the film Black Feminism and the Polycrisis is a film that I worked on with 6 fellows and filmmaker duo from New York, Mac Primo and Adriana De Feo, at a place called the New Institute in Hamburg, where I have spent the past couple of years as program chair and as a research fellow. And we decided to make this film because the world is in this very frightening situation, which we call the polycrisis. You know, there's many ways of expressing it, the polycrisis. Is a term that has come to be used. And I felt when I was putting the program together and the call for applications and all of that, and just thinking about what it was that I wanted to do, this really is a moment in which we need these so-called alternative ways of knowing. So Black feminism, which I use quite interchangeably with African feminism, is a framework, is a movement, it's a political philosophy that has been grappling with with so many of the issues that are shaping and creating the polycrisis for decades. And so there's— we have so many important things to say about the polycrisis. For example, such as that it is a crisis of imagination, as Professor Emejelu says in the film. Also that it is a crisis of power, you know, of hierarchies, of social relations, all these things that we've been talking about already. And it's not just the utterance of these criticisms or claims. It is that actually Black feminist work has been very systemically, or systematically, unpacking and theorizing and analyzing and reimagining and conceptualizing these crises that have to do with the imagination and with power and so on. So even something like intersectionality, which is a theory that so many people now are familiar with and are working with, but its roots in Black feminist theory speak to the ways in which Black and African women's lives have always been in a kind of crisis, and have therefore had to devise theories like intersectionality, which now suddenly feel relevant for everyone. Because we've noticed that, yes, this is how the world is, there are these intersections that affect us in a kind of singular way, all at the same time, exacerbating one another.

Yeah. And one of the things I find really inspiring about sensuous knowledge and probably this is more broadly applied to Black feminism, but sometimes it gets mischaracterized as just a critique. But actually what I felt with Censorous Knowledge particularly is that there's also a vision of what could be like, if there's a really generative vision of how you might come to know the world in different ways or how you already do actually, but you just have, you know, perhaps ignoring them or, you know, not taking them as seriously, calling out the power and critiquing the power structures and framing of crisis and response and all of those things are really, really important. But then I think also what people are searching for is like, but I can't stay in that place of only critique. I also need this other space also to live in, which is what next, I guess. And so, and I think I felt that really strongly with Sensuous Knowledge is, and I feel it also with, for example, Warm Data, with the work that Nora Bateson does, that there's a sense that you are already living a lot of this and there's just a coming to know coming back to yourself or something, if that— I don't know, just there's something that is about a broader kaleidoscopic— I like you use a kaleidoscopic kind of vision of different perspectives, different ways of knowing, different people, different relations, all kind of coming together to kind of create and know the world.

I mean, what's interesting is that I didn't even set out to write a critique at all, you know, and, but I also perhaps didn't set out to write like, you know, a kind of method for what it would look like, because I think that kind of approach comes if you are writing a critique, as you say, like critiques are super important and have their place. But what I was more concerned with was understanding Euro-patriarchal knowledge. And of course, when you're trying to understand something that oppresses or diminishes or creates hierarchies, it becomes a critique in some way. But my motivation was not to critique. My motivation was to understand, and from understanding, then further to clarify, to sort of expound for others to also understand. And then in doing that, it also becomes, I guess, the way that you look at the world then emerges. And so that becomes a kind of vision. And maybe in some sense, that is, there's a difference between the kind of work that is critique and political philosophy, which is not necessarily what I do either, but it's closer to that. And in my forthcoming book, Can Feminism Be African? I'm very much in that space, actually, of like shaping, explaining, building a worldview of sorts. And I think that that matters because reality is far more than our, our worldviews, our philosophies, even our, you know, cosmologies and so on. But those are nevertheless has such major influences on how we shape reality. And for, you know, millennia, our collective realities and our social imaginaries have been shaped by, again, by very specific groups, and even more importantly, by a very particular way of knowing. And that has been done through political philosophy, like, you know, through creating these views. And so what I am driven by, and as you mentioned earlier, we do not necessarily choose, but I I just, you know, have something within me which drives me to kind of make these grand stories and use those as my tool to like try and reimagine. And so it is from there that Sensuous Knowledge, you know, was a seed that I planted and that I suspect I'll continue to nurture future books that I write.

Yeah, I hope so. I mean, and I'm very conscious of this generally with the podcast, but it can often be very heady and big unifying, you know, grand narratives. But actually what's also, I think, really useful for the listeners is to then think about what this means, maybe it more in practice or in practical framings. And you do talk about that in the book. So I just wanted to highlight some of that just in terms of, you touch on the educational implications of what sensuous knowledge might mean in a school context. For example, thinking about empathy and dialogue. As well as maths and science and poetry. I'd love to talk to you about poetry if we can, but just, yeah, could you say just something a bit about how would you envision this situating itself within an educational experience?

Yeah. Well, again, I just need to contextualize in terms of the grand unifying theories, cuz one of the things that I think is really this, one of the key strengths of feminism is that when feminism devises big theories, even if, you know, with some kind of arrogance of a single feminist or even a collective of feminists could do that with the same kind of intellectual arrogance that I guess a lot of men have had throughout history. It nevertheless never embodies that arrogance. And that is because feminism is at its core, an ideology that is trying to break apart power and suffuse reality with care. You know, in some sense that really is what feminism is about. And so it doesn't have that grand, like, oh, this is it, that kind of quality to it. Yeah. So then when you then have written in that way and explored reality in that way, it becomes practical automatically almost, because the, the molecules of your exploration have to do with dismantling power and fostering care. And so within Sensuous Knowledge and in the book, I, I touch on on how we could look at education from a sensuous knowledge approach. And yeah, I mean, what it is, you know, like it's again given equal value to the STEM topics, to, you know, the science, the maths, technology, all of that, and topics like ethics or art or movement, embodiment, you know, maybe it could be called. And I mean, to get into that, at an even deeper level, what I mean is not just that, you know, you have classes in, you know, this potpourri of exciting topics, but that they really are integrated into each other. I mean, for example, if we think about in math class, you know, from a very young age, the way that we're taught to solve equations is quite often by using examples from personal quandaries and, you know, social situations that individuals may encounter. So, you know, we might say that X has a friend who has 10 books, and, you know, and, and they have another friend who has 3, and then we create this equation. What is happening in that situation is often the human situation is almost like a prop to the mathematical equation.

Yeah.

So it's, it's already there. We have this hierarchy, like it's as if, oh, that doesn't matter, like we're just using these these examples so that you will learn that 3 10 is 13. And that is so reductive. You know, there's such an opportunity there in a maths class to show that like, this is actually so applicable to things that are going to have an immense importance in your life. Like you are going to care about your friendships. And there will be things about your friendships that actually have that methodical mathematical quality to it, you know, and so we we could fuse the two.

Yeah.

But equally we could also have a class on say psychology or emotion, emotional intelligence, where we might talk about a situation in which, uh, this is a more difficult because we, we don't even do this, but you know, there are, there's also much more mathematical structures to our psychological and emotional worlds. Mm-hmm. And so we could think about that as well. We could be talking about our emotional life. And try to turn them into a mathematical formula. I mean, that sounds reductive, but why not? We could try that. We could see if there is some kind of, you know, beautiful mathematical problem that is taking place when we are trying to make a decision about where we wanna live or something like that. These amazing opportunities to play with life, to be a bit more playful.

And it is, I mean, it's so many interesting possibilities as, as well as traps there, right? And, and it's like, as you're talking, I'm thinking, you know, cuz one, one move that sometimes happens is that we flip it so that actually we, we just invert the hierarchy and we wanna say that all the, the kind of the emotional, intuitive human relational stuff is actually the stuff that's important. And this stuff called maths and science is really cold and reductive. So you, there's an almost an inversion of the hierarchy. And I think, yeah, why not? Right? Like maths is, is, is another way of expressing some relationships with the world or some relationships between things.

All about expressing relationships. Exactly. Maths is all about expressing, I mean, it's the most emotional topic ever. Right.

Because there's ever topic like that.

Yeah. And, and so that's why I'm using these examples because it's, they don't actually really. Inverse the hierarchy, they really trouble the hierarchy.

Exactly.

Because when you start to— if you brought this conversation about relationship on an emotional level to the math class, you are doing something that is never really done. And vice versa, if we created classes on emotional intelligence and brought in— yeah, very controversial, but actually we would be doing something that we are so unaccustomed to doing, which, which is what our brains and our bodies and our souls, if we have those, if I may use such a poetic term, is, you know, is really craving is that we synthesize and end conflict.

Absolutely. But the other thing that I find interesting is that one of the traps is that the institutions have been set up to love boxes, right? They love the boxes that separate. And so you might create a class called this or a class called that, or, you know, either there is a move that takes knowledge, makes it explicit, A, and B, then separates it into this and not that. And the thing that I feel is happening with sensuous knowledge is like, again, similar to warm data work, is there is just a flow and relationality between things and a synthesis and integration. And then things come apart as well, and then they go back together. You know, it's not all harmony and fluffy bunnies and unicorns. It's, it's movement of life. But the way that the, the institutional structures that we've currently got in education aren't able to hold that level of dynamism and complexity in them because, you know, we need a timetable for the kids on day one, right? So we've gotta put certain things in the timetables and we've gotta allocate a certain teacher to that class. And I think there's also a really deep question about the institutional framings in which these educational relationships happen. Because otherwise we just get pulled back into, oh, well, if we want to do something with this, let's create a class called sensuous knowledge, you know, and then we killed it, right?

Yeah. I endorse a class called sensuous knowledge, 100%. Um, yeah, no, I think what you're saying is, is really important and it takes us back to what I was saying in the beginning that why our educational system looks the way it does.

Yeah.

And that is to create people that we can control more easily. And we can only really ultimately address even the way that we need timetables and we need teachers who also think in boxes. And if we decide somehow, you know, internally as a collective that we do not want our educational systems to create individuals and societies in which persons are controlled. And once we step out of that way of thinking, then it starts to become not only clearer, but also easier to restructure. It doesn't feel as much as, you know, it doesn't feel revolutionary and disruptive. And oh my goodness, I have to change everything about the world, which of course is daunting for the majority of people. But rather, it starts to feel like something that makes sense. And this is also why I said, you know, I'm not so interested in critiquing but in understanding, because once you then have the clarity of your understanding, it just all of a sudden no longer makes sense to structure things in a way that is just producing more suffering. And so, yes, you know, it's— but it is big. I mean, it is in some sense an overhaul of the entire structure, because of course you cannot start to teach children and young people in— or teach is not even the word, you know, you're going to try to like help them to become their best selves or something like that by just reassigning like curricula.

Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, for one, it already calls for even a shift in the mindset of the educator. Exactly. And do people want that? Because it's different, you know, if you have your mindset that, Yes, I'm gonna go and study pedagogy. I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna specialize in that. I'm gonna be an expert in that. I mean, it's, it's, it kind of, if my vision were to become reality, a lot of people would be not out of work per se, but having to retrain.

They'd have to really, exactly, deeply, right? And yeah, as you say, that's maybe not the profession they went into because the thing that education needs to do now is, I think is radically different to what it was set up for initially. And many, I think many people, more and more people agree.

Absolutely. I think so. But I feel that more and more people want that. I feel that educators themselves want that. You know, anybody who's in the arena of knowledge making, knowledge production, or personal transformation or care work, you know, we're all really thirsty to see these kinds of shifts because so many of us anyway see the kinds of problems that this rigid and robotic mechanistic way has produced. So I do think there's a lot more openness, but there's, there's still, we still need to drive home the message of why we're doing this. You know, it's not just about something instrumental like inclusion or diversity or It's something far bigger and more amazing than even those things are.

I completely agree. I completely agree.

No, I love it.

So I would love to just mention power, come back to power and rivers, because I think that a lot of what we've been saying has been a kind of critique of the kind of Euro patriarchal framing of what power is, almost like power over and control you've used a lot and these kinds of things, but actually reading your work about, I may not even pronounce this correctly, but exusions. I'm being a bit French about it, you know, or rivers, a more caring version of what power actually is when you start looking at it in a different kind of way. So I don't know quite what your intention is there or, or whether I'm reading it even correctly, but perhaps you could just say a little bit just to finish off about that. Absolutely.

So in Sensuous Knowledge, I coin an expression I call exusion. It comes from the ancient Greek word for power, exousia, E-X-O-U-S-I-A. And I was writing the chapter about power, or I had started doing my research for it. And at the same time as I was doing that, I was spending a lot of time along rivers. I was traveling to many places. And because in the Yoruba system in Ifa, every person, every Yoruba person, but every person really has has a divinity, which is called an orisha, that is sort of the force that guides you in life, and that you, you should pay heed to. And for me, it's a divinity called Yemoja. And she is the kind of the deity of the seas and oceans, and rivers and water bodies. And so it's very important in my life, you know, I sort of loosely follow this. I'm not a devotee to orishas, but I, I love water anyway. Wherever I travel, it's a priority for me to go to a river or a sea or an ocean. And it just so happened that at the time I was writing this chapter, I was traveling to places that had rivers, and I was, you know, spending a lot of time. And this kind of fusion of thinking about power, spending time by rivers, watching them very closely, and coming upon the word exuja in my research conjoined to become what I called exusions, which I theorize and think about as an alternative way of thinking about power. What I perceive to be the real way, you know, maybe this is my problem, alternative, that it suggests that it's not true or something like that. And the rivers taught me this. I was having kind of, you know, conversations with them, and they were showing me how many obstacles they faced. I mean, you know, whenever I would look at them, there was so much— there was pollution, there's erosion, dams, and, and I just thought, you know, they suffer so much from speciesism. And yet, they continue to flow, like something about that power with which the river just moved beyond, above, sideways through all of these obstacles to get to its destination was teaching me about power. And so I learned that power is not something— it's not control over, it's not power with, necessarily, but it's just something that is and that we all have access to. And I guess, importantly, it is something that unless we think about power differently, we will continue to replicate the same old power structures that are creating the poly crisis and all of the degradation of our planet. And so we desperately need new ways of thinking about power that are rooted in love, like this force that is actually quite loving. And yeah, a bit like gravity, you know, we just like what gravity is to a river, because it's gravity that makes it move and flow. And power is like gravity for us, you know, it's this force that actually sustains us, and yet we think of it as something we can dominate others with, you know? So, so harmful.

Yeah. Amazing. I mean, there's a lot there and we not time to get into it now, but I, I wanted to bring it in cuz I think often, you know, in a way power gets a bad rap, right? It's like that, you know, it is framed often as this power over and the oligarchy and the demagoguery that you talk about. And just, there's something else going on that I think I think if we invite that in too, that it, it allows us to have a more, in a way, as you say, kind of realistic, you know, there are flows and movements and working with that. There's something powerful about the fact that it's, you're rooting it in natural processes as well. I think there's a, there's an increasing recognition that we are not separate from the living world, the more-than-human world and all of that. So I think that's powerful as well. But yeah, I don't, didn't want to just tag it on at the end of the conversation, but at the same time, I think it's such a fundamental piece.

I mean, maybe, maybe one way to conclude that is to ask listeners, you know, if these connections, you know, what you've just described of how we move and how we flow and how we relate is not power, then what is it? You know, if what exousians, as I describe it, you know, people might say, oh, that's so poetic. And many of like indigenous knowledge systems, or when we talk about nature, oh, it's poetic, but it's not scientific, it's not real. My question is, if that is not power, then what is it?

Yeah. And, and, and in a way, for me, it feels like a sensuous knowing of power, if that makes sense. It's like it's a reframing of, of power in a sensuous frame, which is kind of exactly what we've been talking about. And that perhaps if we can bring that more, we can invite ways of knowing the world that are more sensuous as you describe them. But yeah, very important.

If we can feel that, if we can feel power in that way, in that sensuous intimate, embodied way, then what are we doing just looking at it as some, not only as an abstract thing, but as an abstract thing that is very destructive. If we instead could look at it in this way, which is what it is, because I don't know what else it is that we're doing that gets us up in the morning.

Right, exactly.

Right.

Yeah. Maybe there is something, maybe there is a better way to describe it, but to me it is Amazing.

Thank you, Minna. I so appreciate your time and it's just, yeah, there's so much here that I would, I really just want to invite people into and to read your book and your blog is amazing. There's so much there. So yeah, just thank you for taking the time to chat.

Thank you, Tim. It's been great chatting with you.

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