Forum Talk: I move the water and the water moves me: Swimming in ecologies
Speaker: Rebecca Olive, Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Research, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University
Abstract: Research about swimming has tended to focus on sensual experiences of being in water or the health and wellbeing benefits swimming facilitates. But paddling out into open water – ocean, river, lake, dam – puts us in encounter with all kinds of animals, plants, minerals, chemicals, histories, climates, technologies, and ancestors. Our more-thanhuman encounters are often framed by swimmers in terms of wonder or awe, but the encounters we have in the water also come with risks. To swim is to accept ourselves as part of a complex ecology and that our immersion in these environments leaves us vulnerable and lacking in control.
Recent swimming fieldwork has immersed me in risky and challenging aspects of morethan-human research through my encounters with waves, cold temperatures, sharks, debris, jellyfish, and pollution. From stinging tentacles to sharp rocks and branches, to itchy skin and the threat of shark bite, swimming encounters have many possible sensations and outcomes beyond stoke and awe.
Thinking about experiences of relationality, vulnerability and accretion and drawing on the work of ecofeminists, this discussion will explore how sports and physical activities like ocean swimming act as ‘world making’ practices that bring people, ecologies, technologies, geographies, and histories into relation.
