Available now5-MODULE, ONLINE COURSE

Sensuous Knowledge

Shift How You See, Sense, and Imagine the World

Guided by renowned writer and cultural critic Minna Salami, this course invites you to move beyond rigid europatriarchal paradigms and into a worldview that is analytical, holistic, embodied, imaginative, and transformative - rooted in the expansive field of Black Feminist thought.

Curated and facilitated by Minna Salami.

Trailer

Each module contributes to a journey to expand and empower your knowing mind, and toward eradicating the delusions and deceptions of europatriarchal knowledge through exciting feminist ways of seeing reality. Sensuous knowledge is present, alive knowledge, and the sessions will be playful, interweaving disciplines, temporalities and cultures. The sessions will include rituals, prompts and practices, and there will be an introduction to a new paradigm shifting tool each week. Conversation and exchange lie at the heart of the course.

Course modules

Module 1

The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House

The Yoruba pantheon and it’s playful sagacity; how Europatriarchal Knowledge entangles us into delusions and deceptions; an inquiry into paradigm shifts; the illumination that becomes possible through feminist thought; paradigm shifting tool: Sensuous Knowledge

Module 2

Sensing Into Sensuous Knowledge

How to think, feel, dream, and find ways into sensuousness; transgressing Binaries, Dichotomies, Dualisms; Mind or Matter?; Sociopolitical Desires and Erotic Economies; paradigm shifting tool: The Kaleidoscopic Method

Module 3

What Black Feminism Knows

The radical wisdom of black feminism; intersectional knowledge and power Black feminist poetics; multitudes, gardens and tapestries; paradigm shifting tool: Epistemic polyamory

Module 4

Blue Is a Feminine Colour in Africa

Ancestral protofeminist knowledge; explorative practice in colour as pedagogy; further deconstructions in patriarchal knowledge; feminism, power and self-realisation; paradigm shifting tool: Exousiance

Module 5

Finding Voice in a Europatriarchal World

Transgression vs transcendence; writing from your centre; the wandering voice; intellectual, emotional, soulful, political and embodied at once; paradigm shifting tool: “Doing beauty”

Course information

Guided by renowned writer, theorist, and cultural critic, Minna Salami, the Sensuous Knowledge course is a journey into a way of knowing that is alive, poetic, political, and deeply relevant for our times. Rooted in the expansive field of Black Feminist thought, this course invites you to move beyond rigid, europatriarchal paradigms into a worldview that is analytical, holistic, embodied, imaginative, and transformative at once.

Minna’s unique voice, spanning Nigerian and Finnish heritage, and her years living in Sweden, the UK, the US, Germany, and Spain, brings together wisdom kaleidoscopically: from mythology, philosophy, cultural theory, feminist critique, and African knowledge systems. In her hands, knowledge becomes artful, sensuous, and expansive.

Based on her seminal book Sensuous Knowledge, this course is both intellectual and embodied. It offers a new way of relating to reality, one that moves beyond binaries, embraces multiplicity, and returns us to a knowing that is deeply felt, liberatory and alive. This course delves into the teachings of luminaries like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Rita Dove and many more, and into topics such as beauty, poetry, knowledge, revolutionary transformation, and more.

As Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” and in this course, we begin to build a new house; one rooted in possibility and joy.

We are shaped by the knowledge systems we inherit, and we can now recognise that those systems are incomplete and obsolete. Sensuous Knowledge asks us to rethink what we know and how we know it. Drawing on the radical insights of Black feminism, this course offers a reorientation: toward a more connected, just, and rapturously present way of living.

Course Includes

5 modules

1 speaker

Curated readings, resources and embodiment practices

Community discussion area

Video and audio available

Teachers

Minna Salami

Minna Salami is a Nigerian, Finnish, and Swedish feminist author and social critic currently at The New Institute. Her research focuses on Black feminist theory, contemporary African thought, and the politics of knowledge production

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What our students say

Thank you, it was an amazing class and Minna Salami really delivered! Her class outline was wonderfully executed. I was unable to make it to any live meetings but I don't feel like I missed out on anything.

by SJ Wall

Learning outcomes

Discover the Yoruba pantheon as a source of playful, mythic intelligence
Recognise the hidden delusions of Euro-patriarchal knowledge and explore how it fragments our inner and outer worlds
Practice sensuousness as a method of inquiry—blending intuition, intellect, body, and soul
Engage with the thought and spirit of iconic Black feminists including bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and more
Explore feminist tools such as epistemic polyamory, the kaleidoscopic method, and exousiance—each offering new ways of thinking, feeling, and seeing
Understand how intersectionality, erotic economies, and ancestral knowledge shape our ways of being
Reclaim the voice—from centre, from soul, from the margins—and write from a place that is intellectual, emotional, and embodied at once