Affective oceanic seaswimming and encounters for care-full environmental communication

Abstract

Our oceanic swimming practice began as part of the project of doing scholarship differently in contemporary South African post-apartheid contexts. Swimming-writing-reading not only enables different ways of doing inquiry but also prompts new ways of communicating environmental injustices as we face them in/with/through the ocean. We argue the value of this practice, and the writings we generate and share, for a rethinking and reframing of environmental communication through practices of care. “Slow swimming” in the ocean brings one into intimate, affecting encounters with the ocean and its multiplicities. Porous to fluid temporalities, oceanic swimming-writing-reading becomes a hauntological place-space-time-mattering practice of swimming as we become aware of sedimented crimes of slavery and colonization, and confront the ghosts of apartheid and colonial violence. As we meet disasters of present and future, polluted and violated seas, our affective relational watery encounters with more-than-human species sharpen our response-ability to and responsibility for anthropocentric damages to the ocean and planet. We suggest such practices of affective wit(h)nessing, relationality, and care as a productive resource for communicating current environmental challenges that are consequences of certain human hands, as well as our mutual entanglements and response-abilities on planet Earth.