Gender Talk Series with Tamara Shefer
This GEXcel seminar will take place on Zoom. If you wish to attend please contact Jennie Särnmark at jennie.sarnmark@kau.se. Please remember to register the latest by September 13th! The link will then be sent out the day before the seminar to the registered e-mail.
Wild swimming methodologies: some thoughts from South African contexts
Tammy Shefer, University of the Western Cape
In this paper I focus on ocean swimming as one form of wild methodology and Slow scholarship that draws on hauntology, to think about the possibilities of such post-qualitative methodologies for reconceptualising scholarship. My thinking is located in the (post)apartheid space of South African higher education, which continues to be shaped by colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal capitalist logics not withstanding a strong decolonial and transformation project over many years.
Propositions are made here about how a wild swimming methodology may inspire a critical consciousness and engagement as part of the larger project of re-imagining the university as a space of and for justice and flourishing. Sharing some experimental engagements in this context, I 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 (Haraway, 2016) and to open up new imaginaries of scholarship that makes a difference.
Tamara Shefer is professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of the Western Cape. Her work primarily addresses youth, gender and sexualities. She is also engaged in a critical project of reconceptualising higher education, thinking about and experimenting with critical, feminist, social justice scholarly practices, both pedagogies and research.
Most recent books include: The International Handbook of Masculinity Studies (2019, Routledge, with L. Gottzén & U. Mellström); Engaging Youth in Activist Research and Pedagogical Praxis: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race (2018, Routledge, with J. Hearn, K. Ratele & F. Boonzaier) and Socially Just Pedagogies in Higher Education: Critical posthumanist and new feminist materialist perspectives (2018, Bloomsbury, with V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti & M. Zembylas).