As people get their hair done, information is shared at the salon. At the loom, Indigenous weavers teach patterns to the young. With hands in the soil, sowers learn about raining cycles as they plant seeds. For people who work the land, barbers, mourners, ceramicists, and craftspeople, knowledge is passed down from one generation to the next through action and repetition.

We ask as researchers, and sometimes practitioners of such techniques, can we honor and humbly learn from them through the medium of research and academic engagement? Can we recognize and enact their revolutionary potential? 

To address these questions, we are interested in staging a conversation around body-centered techniques utilized for the passing down of knowledge and the creation of art—techniques often marginalized and discredited by Western Eurocentric understandings of knowledge. We are looking to speak about specific processes, understanding them as real alternatives to current conceptualizations of study and the acquisition of knowledge. Though in the past decade, important work has been done to critique and revise colonial hierarchizations which prioritized Western European epistemologies, these revisions often result in the romanticization and metaphorization of “embodied aesthetic techniques;” in such cases, these techniques are used as counterexamples that risk reinforcing the idea of a norm or a standard set by hegemonic institutions. Is this risk an inevitable consequence of bringing embodied and alternative ways of knowing into such institutions? Or is there a way to truly allow these techniques to transform and reorient our writing and research toward a more sustainable, anticolonial, and equitable conception of what it means to know, teach, and learn?