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/

Episode brought to you by me hating on haters of my fav podcast and a 100-year-old Black nationalist newspaper.

This week, we’re thinking about what it means to change your mind. And why doing so in public is one of the most important Black intellectual traditions we have IMO. I start by reflecting on my own relationship to honesty, embodied knowledge, and what I've been learning through living with a changing body with insulin-resistant PMOS. From there, I ask a bigger question: Why are people suspicious of folks changing their minds?

Drawing on haters in the comments of one of my fav pods (Pour Minds), the history of The Crusader newspaper, Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde, I show how changing your mind isn't intellectual inconsistency, it's intellectual honesty and a part of the U.S. Black intellectual tradition.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: Why Changing Your Mind Is Your Intellectual Inheritance

00:22 — Grounding in PMOS

05:01 — Why Changing Your Mind Is Your Intellectual Inheritance

15:33 — Malcolm X: An Example of Changing in Public

References:

Alston, Ashanti. “Be Careful of Your Man-Tones! Gender Politics in Revolutionary Struggle.” Interview by Hilary Darcy. Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements 2, no. 1 (May 2010): 22–35.

Lorde, Audre. “Learning from the 60s.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.

The Crusader. 1918–1922

Pour Minds (hosts Lex P and Drea Nicole)

This week has me pondering time travel.

Not the sci-fi kind. But the kind that happens when one develops intellectual relationships with people and ideas from the past.

I explore what it means to not just think *about* the past, but with it. Drawing from my own work as an intellectual historian, I share how developing a relationship with a single question can become a time traveling machine (of sorts). My questions (or Roman Empire as they say interwebs) are around Black women's spiritual and intellectual lives and the role of embodied knowledge in religious meaning-making. I think you should have your own too! And once you do, I discuss what I think really gets one jetting across space-time (intellectually, that is).

Chapters

0:00 Teaser

0:22 Grounding in Being Alone

3:36 Grounding Question: How to Time Travel

8:20 What I Think Is the Best Way

15:04 Desecularizing Time

18:09 So You've Got Your Question, Found Some Answers, Now What?

References

Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New York. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

This week, we have a listener question! A lovely listener from Canada asked: What are your thoughts on Black Muslims making Islamic decisions?

To answer, I take a step back and ask a different question: What makes a decision Islamic in the first place?

I talk about what scholars call a "lived religion" approach to Islam and turn to Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam? to think through how Muslims make meaning in conversation with revelation, tradition, and their lived realities. From this perspective, what makes something Islamic is not necessarily the outcome of a decision, but the meaning-making process itself. Why? Because the Islamic tradition has always contained contradictions, competing interpretations, and multiple ways of understanding what it means to live as a Muslim.

Of course, we also turn to Dr. Kayla Renée Wheeler's concept of "hegemonic Islam" to think about how race and gender shape who and what gets recognized as authentically Islamic, and why Black Muslim practices are often measured against anti-Black and gendered assumptions about the tradition.

Then, I spend time thinking with the one and only Dr. amina wadud as an example of Black Muslim decision making. Through her Tawhidic paradigm and her willingness to "just say no" to certain verses, dominant interpretations, and norms, wadud offers a powerful egalitarian framework for making meaning within the tradition and imagining more just Muslim futures.

Chapters

00:00 Teaser: What Makes Something Islamic?

00:27 Grounded in Knowing My Why So I Don't Feel Cringe

09:16 Listener Question: What Are Your Thoughts on Black Muslims Making Islamic Decisions?

10:11 What Makes Something Islamic?

19:23 Hegemonic Islam

24:55 amina wadud & Tawhidic Paradigm

32:35 — Muslima Theology: What Happens When You Disagree with the Norm?

38:24 — Why Crave Simplicity When There is the Capacity for Complexity?

Ahmed, Shahab. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

wadud, amina. Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

wadud, amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006.

Hidayatullah, Aysha A. Feminist Edges of the Qur'an. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Wheeler, Kayla Renée. “All Americanists Are Christian, All Muslims Are Brown, but Some of Us Are Brave: Conclusion.” American Religion 2, no. 1 (2020).

I’m talking the talk and walking the walk this week by channeling an episode on channeling. I explore two questions that have become central to how I think about channeling, knowledge, and purpose: What do I desire to know more about? And what desires to be known through me?

Along the way, I discuss my experience as an academic advisor and helping students identify their intellectual passions, intuition as method, and moments when research reaches back.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Teaser: Wanna Channel?

00:32 Finding Grounding in the Flow

02:28 What Is Channeling? 2 Questions

11:37 What Is Your Medium

15:49 Intuition as Method

19:46 How to Vonnect with Me

REFERENCE

Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021.

Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Duke University Press, 2007.

Episode 1: Where Do You Know From?

Episode 4: Listener Question: How to Make a Writing Practice (or Any Practice) Spiritual

This week, I’m thinking about self-determination: one of the most important concepts in Black political, intellectual, and spiritual life!

Starting from a moment of personal reflection on feeling caught in an ebb rather than a flow, I explore what it means to determine the potentiality of your own being according to your own sense of things. Moving between Black intellectual history and my own life, I trace how self-determination has taken different forms across Black thought, from struggles for community control over schools to Black nationalist visions of independent nations.

Thinking with the histories of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the Republic of New Afrika, and Black Power era organizing, I reflect on why self-determination has never meant just one thing and why every attempt to live a self-determined life is necessarily messy, unfinished, and full of trial and error.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Teaser

00:27 Grounding in the Ebb and Flow of Life

04:07 - What is Self-Determination?

07:01 - Two Different Takes on Self-Determination in 1968: The Republic of New Afrika and Ocean Hill-Brownsville

19:01 - Self-Determination as a Lived Practice

30:05 - Self-Determination as Trial and Error

References:

Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

For a good read on the religion of Black Power, I would recommend: Corbman, Marjorie. Divine Rage: The Religious and Political Dimensions of Black Power. New York: NYU Press, 2025.

For more on Ocean Hill-Brownsville, I recommend listening to School Colors, a podcast about race, education, and the struggle for community control in Brooklyn during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis:

https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/brooklyn