Wild sea swimming as a slow intimacy: towards reconfiguring scholarship

dc.contributor.authorBozalek, Vivienne
dc.contributor.authorShefer, Tamara
dc.date.accessioned2025-10-29T10:59:22Z
dc.date.available2025-10-29T10:59:22Z
dc.date.issued2024
dc.description.abstractOur 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.
dc.identifier.citationBozalek, V., Shefer, T. and Romano, N., 2024. Wild Sea Swimming as a Slow Intimacy: Towards Reconfiguring Scholarship. FEMINIST ENCOUNTERS.
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/14223
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10566/21291
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherLectito
dc.subjectDecolonising higher education
dc.subjectEthics of care
dc.subjectHealth and well-being
dc.subjectHydrofeminism
dc.subjectOceanic swimming
dc.titleWild sea swimming as a slow intimacy: towards reconfiguring scholarship
dc.typeArticle

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Name:
bozalek_wild_sea_swimming_2024.pdf
Size:
607.92 KB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
1.71 KB
Format:
Item-specific license agreed upon to submission
Description: