Wild Sea Swimming as a Slow Intimacy

Towards Reconfiguring Scholarship

Bibliographic Data

ID3004256
AuthorsVivienne Bozalek (0000-0002-3212-1910, Rhodes University, corresponding author), T Shefer (0000-0002-1201-8043, University of the Western Cape, corresponding author), Nike Romano (0000-0002-2480-3524, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume8
Issue1
Pages12
Publication date2024-03-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Encounters A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2468-4414 • E-ISSN: 2468-4414
PublisherLectito BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.20897/femenc/14223
OpenAlexW4392366068
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited20

Our oceanic swimming-writing-reading together practice coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and subsequent lockdown in South Africa. Awash with vulnerability, precarity, and isolation, oceanic swimming-writing-reading became one of the few ways in which we, as three academics from different higher education institutions, found respite in a practice of care for ourselves and others. Curious as to whether swimming and free writing could materialise alternative creative scholarly practices, we began to meet regularly to swim, write, read and think together with theoretical perspectives that subscribe to a feminist relational ontology. This article turns to visual and written narratives generated during this period and building on them, considers health and wellbeing at both subjective and planetary levels. Our global southern location articulates with these themes in very particular ways - access, risk and embodiment in relation to seas, beaches and littoral zones. South Africa remains haunted by the continuing geopolitical effects of its slave, colonial, apartheid, and neoliberal past and current contexts of global capitalism that seep into encounters with the ocean. Our swimming-writing-thinking is a reminder of our relationalities with and response-abilities for the hydrocommons as the measure of human, other species and the planet's capacity to survive and flourish

Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

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