This week, we're answering the question: How do you strengthen your intuition?

Over the past few weeks, we've explored intuition through philosophy, Black thought, and management studies. This week, I wanted to do something different and answer that question through my own life.

I share the three practices that have most transformed my relationship to intuition over the past five years: developing a relationship with myself via journaling, learning to distinguish what I want from what other people want for me, and embracing the conflict that comes from actually acting on what my intuition tells me.

Along the way, I reflect on journaling, therapy, prayer, graduate school, learning to trust myself as a scholar of Black Muslim thought, and why I want all my women and femmes to leave behind the idea that there is redemption in our suffering (which is a huge barrier to developing clear intuition).

This week, we're answering the question: Is intuition a sign of expertise?

Building on last week's conversation about intuition as evidence in psychology, I turn to another field that has spent decades studying intuition: management and organizational learning.

I explore an argument I found really compelling: that intuition is often the outcome of expertise. In other words, the people we think of as "intuitive" are frequently drawing on years of disciplined observation, tacit knowledge, and experience.

But as a scholar of religion and Black intellectual history, I’m also interested in where that understanding falls short. What happens when intuition is understood only as something that comes out of experience + expertise… and not forms of knowledge beyond the self? Like higher powers, ancestors, the unseen, Allah, the divine, etc.

Chapters

00:00 — Grounding in Knowing Who You Are When Things Go Left

10:58 — This Week's Question: Is Intuition a Sign of Expertise?

13:09 — Intuition as Creative Insight

16:42 — Intuition as an Outcome of Expertise

27:40 — What's Missing? Spirituality and Intuition

32:30 — Prof in the Park Announcement

RSVP for Prof in the Park 7/30 @ Prospect Park: https://partiful.com/e/PEwdmeIc0rwTtByx9tHH?c=OZ0f4dpM

Reference

Dörfler, Viktor, and Fran Ackermann. "Understanding intuition: The case for two forms of intuition." Management learning 43, no. 5 (2012): 545-564.

This week we're answering the question: What are two ways of understanding intuition?

As I begin writing a book chapter on intuition, I am getting right on how different fields actually define the term. Drawing on philosophy, Black feminist thought, and religious studies, I explore two distinct understandings of intuition I’ve encountered so far.

First, I introduce a philosophical conversation that understands intuition as *evidence* or a form of perceptual knowledge that helps explain how we arrive at beliefs before we have empirical proof.

Then, I turn to Black thought, where intuition becomes something much more than evidence. Through thinkers like Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Louise Little, and Alea Lovely, I argue that intuition is also a method: a disciplined practice, a cultivated mode of knowing, and a way of making decisions in a world where dominant ideas of evidence have often been used to deny Black people's realities of things (and justify their dehumanization).

At the heart of this episode is a bigger question: What happens when intuition isn't just something you have, but something you practice and develop?

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

0:12 - Grounded in Navigating Adult Friendships

9:15 - Two Different Ways of Understanding Intuition

12:28 - Intuition As Evidence Conversation in Philosophy

15:09 - Intuition as Perceptual Knowledge

20:41 - Intuition as Method

References

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000).

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984).

Wilfred Little, "Our Family From the Inside: Growing Up with Malcolm X." Contributions in Black Studies 13, no. 1 (1995): 7–47. (Originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on April 18, 1995.)

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibs/vol13/iss1/2/

Mark Moffett, "Intuition as Evidence: An Introduction," in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence, edited by Maria Lasonen-Aarnio and Clayton Littlejohn (New York: Routledge, 2021).

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Intuition":

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/intuition/

Alea Lovely, Spiritual Shit podcast:

https://www.thelovelyalea.com/