Embodied Knowledge and Sensory Justice

Sor Juana's writing integrates sensory detail, emotion, and embodied experience with philosophical argument. She refused the split between mind and body, reason and feeling, that characterized her era's intellectual hierarchies. Climate justice similarly must honor bodily knowledge: the fisherman who reads water conditions through generations of practice, the asthmatic child knowing pollution through their lungs, the farmer feeling soil degradation through their hands. Sensory justice means validating these knowledges against technocratic dismissal. Communities experiencing environmental racism often report health impacts long before official science acknowledges them. This concept insists that climate solutions protect sensory capacities and respect embodied wisdom. It challenges the notion that only quantified, abstracted knowledge counts. Sor Juana's integration of body and mind offers an intellectual framework honoring how we actually experience and know the world.