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Coastal Thought: An Alphabet Spanning the Seas
Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean, 2020
Seeking to reflect on the shore, this essay attempts an immanent and mimetic method that approaches its subject in a manner informed by its own properties and practices. The coast is by nature non-linear and functions through fluctuance. It affords a mode of thought that ebbs and floods and in which meaning surfaces only to be again submerged, in which images and ideas silt up only to erode into dispersed sediments that will be deposited on other shores. Its peculiar logic is simultaneously random and systematic, variable and repetitive. Generated by inexorable rhythmic forces, it is also directed by serendipity: it is structured by tides, currents and winds that are alternatively periodic and spasmodic, and which deliver various fragments of flotsam to shore. It is composed of miscellaneous things and distributed agencies that gather into transitory assemblages, before dissipating and regrouping elsewhere. Experimenting with an appropriate form through which to convey the systematic haphazardness of coastal thought, the essay presents an alphabet spanning the seas – from Cacophony to Cyclone – that is designed according to a structured syllabary determined by the fortuitous homophonic resonance of the character C.
New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research 56, no. 3, 430-446., 2022
This paper emerges from a Marsden project, Let the River Speak, focused on the Waimatā River in Gisborne, bringing insights from mātauranga and wānanga together with a wide range of disciplines to produce innovative and engaged understandings of ki uta ki tai-the life of rivers from the mountains to the sea. In Te Ao Māori, waterways are relational knots/nodes/strands in a meshwork of whakapapa that arises from exchanges between earth and sky, land and sea. This approach acknowledges the relations between the atmosphere, surface water and groundwater, vegetation cover, land use, water quality and quantity, the sea, plants, animals, microorganisms and people; and rivers as beings in their own right, with their own rights. Let the River Speak is codeveloped with the river by a team including iwi researchers, scholars from earth system science, geomorphology, microbiology and infectious diseases, forest ecology, anthropology, creative practice, and business studies. It is holistic, working across different knowledge systems to understand the full complexity of waterways in relationship with people and other life forms over time. At the same time, it is hopeful, providing a relational framework for actions to restore river and estuarine communities to a state of ora (health, wellbeing, flourishing).
Uisge Beatha: the ebb and flow of four tides
2014
Life-stories explore who we are and how others view us, allowing critical insights into the nature of belonging and place, acceptance and othering in the development of a hybrid and postcolonial identity. Drawing upon the seminal works of authoethnographers Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner, the identity and border theories of Homi Bhabha and the phenomenological inquiry of Max Van Manen the authors as migrants, educators and researchers create a 4 dimensional framework across which the trajectory of one researcher's life from foundling child to mature adult is explored. Interweaving autobiographic narratives, transcripts of oral history, and symbolic representations of displacement and disempowerment from one author's life, the researchers subject that thick data to critical conversations. This critical exploration of narratives of displacement, labelling and othering creates a space out of which counter narratives of agency, resilience and transformation emerge, suggesting the subtlety and power of storytelling and writing for professionals in diasporic and transnational contexts of education. Uisge Beatha: This final destination is both an end and a beginning. The wind whispers and sighs across the waters. The surface is disturbed and tiny droplets are sucked into the air to become moisture soaked clouds which deposit their water on the land. The water that began its life seeping through the moss of a highland plateau now brings new life to areas far from Cairngorm. The cycle of life has no beginning and no end but is transmuted into a fresh form in a different environment.
Wading Through the Mangroves: Thoughts on Theorising the Coast
In Coastal Cultures: Leisure and Liminality. (2014) Paul Gilchrist, Thomas Carter, and Daniel Burdsey, eds. Eastbourne: LSA Publications. Pp. 29-43
On December 2, 1956, the yacht Granma ran aground in low tide. Apparently stuck some hundreds of yards from the Cuban coast, Fidel Castro and his small band of rebels were forced to disembark and wade through the tidal mud to reach the shore. They soon realized that this shore was not a place of straightforward transition between sea and land, but in fact a mangrove swamp with water up to their knees and occasionally up to their necks. Gnarled tree roots, vines, sharp-edged leaves all formed a supremely difficult obstacle course. With no discernable directional landmarks, the labyrinthine mangroves were a frightening and exhausting environment. The men constantly tripped over submerged tree trunks. It took them over two hours to traverse the distance of less than a mile before they emerged from the swamp. They were soaked, many uniforms were in tatters and the majority of their equipment had been lost. In addition, eight men were missing, seemingly swallowed by the swamp. 1 This inauspicious beginning of the Cuban Revolution might be taken as metaphorical for the difficulties encountered by academic researchers intent on theorizing 'the Coast'. 2 As a particular and peculiar kind of space -not merely where water meets land -the Coast is nebulous, ambiguous and, curiously, yet to be fully problematized. This chapter attempts to chart some of this territory by providing an exploratory outline of the Coast and the various ways in which it has hitherto been employed in ethnographic enquiry. The approach is from an anthropological perspective that often considers the ways social life is organized in 'out of the way places', an approach that both reveals and reinforces the spatial and temporal marginalization of those studied . Here, I first consider some of the ways in which the Coast, as both a conceptual and material space, has been assumed to be an 'out of the way' space. I make no claims to have covered all anthropological ethnography within this chapter, in part
'Swimming Against th Tide' - Special issue of Lagoonscapes Journal
Lagoonscapes, 2023
This issue of Lagoonscapes binds thinkers, scholars, artists, activists, policymakers and curators from Venice and the Pacific in a holistic way, in dialogue and with converging views and vantage points, discussing human/non-human relationships, cross-disciplinary dialogues and ancestral epistemologies. First-hand knowledge and experiences shift the perspective from rigid academic and institutional structures to personal ruminations on the injuries of colonisation. One of the aims of this special issue of Lagoonscapes is to decentralise and provincialise such ‘Man-as-human’ as the subject/object of inquiry, and thus counter and reframe established geographies, histories and temporalities. https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/the-venice-journal-of-environmental-humanities/