[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-seo-347775-105":3,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":81,"doc-detail-347775-en":130},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"ok",{"site_id":7,"language":8,"slug":9,"title":10,"keywords":11,"description":12,"schema_data":13,"social_meta":74,"head_meta":76,"extra_data":78,"updated_unix":80},105,"en","wild-sea-swimming-as-a-slow-intimacy-towards-reconfiguring-scholarship","Wild Sea Swimming as a Slow Intimacy - Towards Reconfiguring Scholarship","","Our oceanic swimming-writing-reading together practice coincided with the COVID-19 outbreak and ensuing South African lockdown, becoming a rare form of respite built on vulnerability, precarity, and isolation. Through regularly swimming, free writing, and reading with feminist relational ontology, the article analyzes visual and written narratives to examine health and wellbeing at subjective and planetary scales. It connects access, risk, and embodiment to hydrocommons responsibilities amid colonial and neoliberal geopolitical afterlives.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/","Literature",3,{"item":32,"name":10,"@type":21,"position":33},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/wild-sea-swimming-as-a-slow-intimacy-towards-reconfiguring-scholarship/347775/",4,{"url":32,"name":10,"@type":35,"image":36,"author":41,"headline":10,"publisher":44,"fileFormat":47,"inLanguage":8,"description":12,"dateModified":48,"datePublished":49,"encodingFormat":47,"isAccessibleForFree":50,"interactionStatistic":51},"DigitalDocument",{"url":37,"@type":38,"width":39,"height":40},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/wild-sea-swimming-as-a-slow-intimacy-towards-reconfiguring-scholarship/347775.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":42,"@type":43},"Bintang","Person",{"url":19,"name":45,"@type":46},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-22","2026-09-22",true,{"@type":52,"interactionType":53,"userInteractionCount":55},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":54},"ViewAction",9,{"@type":57,"mainEntity":58},"FAQPage",[59,65,69],{"name":60,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":62},"How did COVID-19 shape the authors’ oceanic swimming-writing-reading practice?","Question",{"text":63,"@type":64},"It coincided with the outbreak and South African lockdown, intensifying vulnerability and isolation while turning oceanic encounters into a form of care and respite.","Answer",{"name":66,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":67},"What is the central purpose of the article?",{"text":68,"@type":64},"To consider visual and written narratives generated during this period and to examine health and wellbeing across subjective and planetary levels through feminist relational perspectives.",{"name":70,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":71},"How do the authors frame “Slow intimacy” in relation to scholarship?",{"text":72,"@type":64},"They trace cross-cutting currents of Slow intimacy that arise from swimming-thinking-writing together, emphasizing depth and quality of engagement rather than time-based slowness.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":32,"og:type":75,"og:title":10,"og:site_name":45,"og:description":12},"article",{"robots":77,"canonical":32},"index,follow",{"doc_id":79,"site_id":7},347775,1790678345,{"code":4,"msg":82,"data":83},"success",[84,88,91,95,100,105,110,115,119,122,126],{"id":22,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":85,"show_sort_weight":86,"slug":87},"Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":26,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":29,"show_sort_weight":89,"slug":90},80,"literature",{"id":33,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":92,"show_sort_weight":93,"slug":94},"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":96,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":97,"show_sort_weight":98,"slug":99},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":101,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":102,"show_sort_weight":103,"slug":104},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":106,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":107,"show_sort_weight":108,"slug":109},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":111,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":112,"show_sort_weight":113,"slug":114},8,"Research & Report",30,"research-report",{"id":55,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":116,"show_sort_weight":117,"slug":118},"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":117,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":120,"show_sort_weight":117,"slug":121},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":123,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":124,"show_sort_weight":123,"slug":125},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":127,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":128,"show_sort_weight":96,"slug":129},19,"General","general",{"code":4,"msg":82,"data":131},{"doc_id":79,"user_id":132,"nickname":42,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":26,"category_name":29,"doc_title":10,"doc_description":12,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":55,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":22,"is_downloadable":22,"audit_status":22,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":8,"site_id":7,"html_lang":8,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":12,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},962085564381,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_6f874abed73319feea01a86fa6f0fab8","Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 8(1), 12  \nISSN: 2468-4414  \nWild Sea Swimming as a Slow Intimacy: Towards Reconfiguring Scholarship  \nVivienne Bozalek 1,2*, Tamara Shefer 1, Nike Romano 3  \nPublished: March 1, 2024  \nABSTRACT  \nOur 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.  \nKeywords: oceanic swimming, ethics of care, relationality, slow intimacy, health and well-being, hydrofeminism, decolonising higher education  \nINTRODUCTION  \nOur oceanic swimming-writing-thinking together emerged out of our watery engagements with reconceptualising higher education in the context of South African post-apartheid challenges and within the larger project of justice and decolonial scholarship globally (Shefer, Bozalek and Romano, 2024; Romano, Bozalek and Shefer, 2023) . Deeply aware of how normative practices in the neoliberal capitalist, masculinist academy repeat colonial, patriarchal and humanist logics, we have been working with imaginative, creative, embodied, processual, relational and affective practices to question and re-think conventional ways of doing academia. In this article, we share some of our narratives and images from this project which foreground the Slow 1 intimacies that we have been involved with, in and through our oceanic hydrofeminist2 (Neimanis, 2012, 2013, 2017a, 2017b) swimmingthinking-writing together. Encrusted with ocean bacteria, shivering with cold, and awash with images of luminescent underwater spaces, our writings and images speak of the poignant intimacies of ‘taking a thought to water’3. We appreciate our visceral affective engagements with marine creatures, plants and rocks, of delighting in their exquisite colours and forms. Our narratives speak to our awe of a methodology of encounter (Probyn, 2016),  \n1 Slow is written with a capital letter as it does not connote doing things slowly in terms of time but rather is concerned with the depth and quality of engagement as is proposed by the Slow movement (see Bozalek, 2017, 2021) .  \n2 Hydrofeminism is a concept created by Astrida Neimanis to convey a form of ‘aqueous body-writing’ (Neimanis, 2012: 112) with water deployed as a feminist figuration that allows for a re-imagining of human entanglements with all species and the planet and the acknowledgment of a hydrocommons that we are all responsible for and response-able to.  \n3 ‘Taking a thought to water’ is similar to Hannah Arendt’s idea that to think with an enlarged mentality is to cultivate the ability to take one’s imagination visiting – as cited in Donna Haraway’s (2016: 126) Staying with the Trouble.  \nFigure 1. 5African kelp ","cbCaiqRpW1HBkrqH","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiqRpW1HBkrqH","pdf",622506,12,"English","# Abstract\n# Introduction\n## Feminist relational ontology and oceanic methodology\n## Hydrofeminism and aqueous body-writing\n## Taking a thought to water and enlarged mentality\n## Embodied encounters, care, and response-ability","[{\"question\":\"How did COVID-19 shape the authors’ oceanic swimming-writing-reading practice?\",\"answer\":\"It coincided with the outbreak and South African lockdown, intensifying vulnerability and isolation while turning oceanic encounters into a form of care and respite.\"},{\"question\":\"What is the central purpose of the article?\",\"answer\":\"To consider visual and written narratives generated during this period and to examine health and wellbeing across subjective and planetary levels through feminist relational perspectives.\"},{\"question\":\"How do the authors frame “Slow intimacy” in relation to scholarship?\",\"answer\":\"They trace cross-cutting currents of Slow intimacy that arise from swimming-thinking-writing together, emphasizing depth and quality of engagement rather than time-based slowness.\"}]","Wild Sea Swimming as a Slow Intimacy - Towards Reconfiguring Scholarship | PDF",1790069097,18]