A consensus is building that our planet has entered the so-called age of the Anthropocene—a post-Holocene epoch defined by the significant impact of humans on geological, biotic and climatic planetary processes. On the one hand, there is good reason to exercise caution in relation to this concept of the “Age of Man.” At a time when immoderate anthropogenic impact poses a serious threat to ecological integrity and balance, calling an epoch after ourselves does not necessarily demonstrate the humility we may (...) need to espouse. Moreover, discourses of the Anthropocene risk overwriting important differences among human.. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This paper appraises the role of critical-feminist figurations within the environmental humanities, focusing on the capacity of figures to produce situated environmental knowledges and pose site-specific ethical obligations. We turn to four environments—the home, the skies, the seas and the microscopic—to examine the work that various figures do in these contexts. We elucidate how diverse figures—ranging from companion animals to birds, undersea creatures and bugs—reflect productive traffic between longstanding concerns in feminist theory and the environmental humanities, and generate new insights (...) related to situated knowledges, feminist care-ethics and the politics of everyday sensory encounters. We also argue, however, that certain figures have tested the limits of theoretical approaches which have emerged as the product of dialogue between feminist theory and environmental studies. In particular, we explore how particular figures have complicated ethical questions of how to intervene in broad environmental threats borne of anthropogenic activities, and of who or what to include in relational ethical frameworks. (shrink)

In this article, I try to document the lived experiences of nurses who were sent to Wuhan to work in the COVID‐19 wards and consider the impact of such experiences on their psychological well‐being. I show the contextual factors in Wuhan, the inherent nature of nursing during the pandemic and the transition from the immediate reactions of nurses to long‐term impacts on their personalities, formed through the whole process of abjection. Therefore, I argue that we need to consider how nursing (...) experiences, before, during and after their professional work in the wards, would instigate abjection within nurses. The abjection of nurses does not start only from the ward, nor does it not end in the ward. Rather, the abjection of nurses, as a reaction to lived experiences, is nuanced and the study of it can reveal rich details of nurses' life both inside and outside of the ward. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for the notion of what I term ‘uncanny water’ as a conceptual tool for reading contemporary oceanic fictions. The uncanny’s affective capacity to destabilise epistemological and ontological certainties makes it a particularly potent literary tool for challenging the nature/culture binary. I argue that fictions which actively defamiliarise the ocean can be used to redress the anthropocentric privilege found in hitherto narratives of the oceanic that were predicated upon mastery and control, and that uncanny moments of (...) displacement and uncertainty can illuminate human/oceanic interconnections and foster a sense of responsibility and compassion towards the oceans. I identify resonances between the uncanny’s continuing referentiality and the notion that feminist transcorporeality interrelates the subject into networks of materiality which extend across time and space in unknowable ways. Both transcorporeality and the uncanny work against the conceit of the individual through the dissolution of boundaries, and, crucially, both require a suspension of assumptions of the self as whole, discrete and impermeable. To demonstrate this, I read the uncanny waters of contemporary fictions from the Northern Atlantic Littoral (Atlantic Canada and the westernmost parts of the UK). The littoral position of these spaces makes them ideally placed to negotiate the borders between habitable and unhabitable spaces, and the limitations of knowledge that run alongside this. I assert that iterations of uncanny water offer a transoceanic dialogue which shifts constructions of subjectivity away from national and terrestrial boundaries to one more akin to the fluid and relational dialectics of transcorporeality. (shrink)