Wild Swimming Methodologies for Decolonial Feminist Justice-to-Come Scholarship

Abstract

This article thinks with oceans and swimming, in dialogue with decolonial feminist materialist approaches and other current novel methodologies which foreground embodiment and relational ontologies, in order to consider the conceptual potential of such diffractions for the project of alternative scholarly practices. We focus on swimming in the sea as one form of wild methodology and Slow scholarship that draws on hauntology to think about the possibilities of such methodologies for troubling normative academic practices directed at different ways of being and becoming. Located in the (post-)apartheid space of South African higher education, which continues to follow and reinstate colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal capitalist logics, we ask questions about the silences around material histories of subjugation and violence that are embedded in the institution and the lives of those who enter these spaces. Propositions are made about how a swimming methodology may inspire a consciousness and engagement with intersectional gender hauntings that permeate the material, curricula, relational and affective spaces of academia as part of disrupting and reimagining the university as a space of/for justice and flourishing. We explore the ways in which embodied, affective methodologies in or near the ocean/s may be deployed to subvert and reconfigure, to make and stay with trouble. We therefore propose sea swimming as a powerful way of thinking with the sea in productive and creative ways for scholarship towards a justice-to-come, to open up new imaginaries of scholarship that make a difference.

Ethological propositions for curriculum studies in higher education

“…Decentring both the human and the metaphysics of individualism with its bounded and propertied entities of various kinds, form part of the posthumanist project of going against the grain of colonialism and neoliberalism endemic in academic curricula (Barad 2017). This article joins other scholars writing from posthumanist and decolonial sensibilities (see for example, Dei and Brooks 2023;Du Preez, Le Grange, and Simmonds 2022;Le Grange 2020;Rosiek, Snyder, and Pratt 2019;Shefer & Bozalek 2022;Snaza (2019b), Soudien 2021Zembylas 2018;Zhao 2021) in making a modest contribution to these concerns raised about curriculum studies in order to propose some alternative moves for "burrowing differently" (Snaza et al 2014, 52) into curriculum studies.…”

Wild Sea Swimming as a Slow Intimacy: Towards Reconfiguring Scholarship

“…In this respect, as we have argued elsewhere, [w]e propose swimming as a way of refusing everyday practices of the academy that assume or insist on disembodied, disaffect/ive/ed, speeded-up, instrumentalist, consumerist, extractive scholarship, ignoring and erasing relationality and response-ability. (see Shefer and Bozalek, 2022) Since all of us had experienced swimming as a space for clarity in our own academic work, we were deeply aware of the way in which cultivating the art of swimming-writing practice enriched our curiosity and our thinking. As Bonnie Tsui (2020: 7) argues about swimming:…”

Doing Academia Differently: Creative Reading/Writing-With Posthuman Philosophers

“…The final example of creative reading and writing practices with posthuman texts is Tamara Shefer’s and my piece on embodied sea-swimming (Shefer & Bozalek, in press). In this article, we describe the workshops on swimming/writing retreats that we have been involved in over the past 2 years where we swim in tidal pools and the sea and then engage in free writing afterward and read our narratives to each other.…”