Exploring Sensuous Knowledge: Two Events with Minna Salami
Exploring Sensuous Knowledge
Minna Salami visited Stockholm to discuss her book Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone, where she challenges Western knowledge ideals from a Black feminist perspective. She explored sensual knowledge as a living, multi-perspective alternative to rational dominance, in conversation with Jonna Bornemark and at the Stockholm University of the Arts.
A few weeks ago, Nigerian-Finnish writer and philosopher Minna Salami visited Stockholm for two events co-organised by Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus, Stockholms konstnärliga högskola, and the research environment TRANSPLACE. Both events centred around Salami’s recent book Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone, a work that challenges dominant paradigms of knowledge and offers alternative ways of understanding the world.
Minna Salami is the author of Sensuous Knowledge: : A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Can Feminism Be African? A Most Paradoxical Question (Harper Collins, 2025). Her work has been translated into several languages and has gained international acclaim for its intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to feminism, philosophy, and aesthetics. She is also the founder of the award-winning blog MsAfropolitan.com.
The first event took place on March 31 at Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus, where Salami was joined in conversation by Professor Jonna Bornemark. Together, they explored themes of embodied knowledge and lived experience, asking how art, poetry, and beauty can deepen our ways of knowing.
In the second event, held at Stockholms konstnärliga högskola, Salami delved into the philosophical foundations of Sensuous Knowledge, introducing key concepts such as "Europatriarchal knowledge"—a mode of knowledge rooted in the weaponization of rationalism—and contrasting it with the kaleidoscopic, multiperspectival nature of sensuous knowledge she introduces. Reflecting on today’s environmental and political crises, Salami noted that sensuous knowledge can be something joyful and alive, allowing us to reclaim sensibility amidst all the heaviness.