Oceans and other bodies of water in South Africa hold a specific history of trauma, haunted by the ghosts of centuries of (hydro)colonisation (Hofmeyr, 2019), and decades of apartheid, which negatively impacted and continue to constrain many communities’ access to oceans, water, as well as livelihoods. South Africa currently faces the ominous impacts of continued legacies of apartheid, underpinned by colonial logics in the shape of contemporary late racial capitalism, including extractivist oceanic mining, overfishing, sewage spillage, industry pollution, and other invasive and toxic practices (e.g. Green, 2020; McGarry, 2024; Petrik et al., 2017), devastating the livelihoods and well-being of humans, other species and the living oceans,beaches and river systems. In addition, the omnipresent failures of access to basic services related to water reflect a set of continuities that have their origins in the uneven distributional regimes of colonialism and apartheid, as well as in the derelictions of the post-apartheid state. These challenges are also raced, classed, and gendered, so that poor, Black women and other marginal communities are impacted more harshly, are exposed to the effects of environmental degradations, are frequently excluded from decision-making, and their important knowledges erased (e.g. Francis & McGarry, 2024).

The Apartheid Archive Project’s 2027 conference will extend the focus on quotidian experiences of apartheid divides, racist violences intersecting with other forms of injustice, to focus in on narratives related to oceans and bodies of water across diverse geographies and temporalities, as shaping and shaped by the past and continuities of apartheid. The conference will ask questions such as: How might thinking with oceans, rivers,other bodies of water, littoral spaces of beaches and other geopolitical materialities open up a deeper understanding of everyday subjugations of (post)apartheid and its embeddedness in colonization? And how might such engagements contribute to critical scholarship and practices challenging continued inequalities in South Africa, rooted in the past of apartheid, and how it bleeds into the present?  

Abstracts may be submitted within the following thematic areas, amongst others:

• Oceans, beaches and other water bodies in everyday experiences of apartheid and how these shape present access to beaches and the sea
• Extractivist and violent histories of (hydro)coloniality and apartheid in relation to oceans and bodies of water and impacts on current social and environmental survival and flourishing
• Political histories of access to water for drinking, livelihood and leisure
• Artistic, embodied and affective engagements deploying bodies of water as public pedagogies, advocacy and resistance to violences of apartheid
• Activism and resistance that work with oceans, rivers, other bodies of water for environmental and social justice
• Watery urbanisms: thinking (post)apartheid cities from bodies of water in and around cities
• Intersectionalities: gendered, raced, classed, sexualised, age, and other inequalities as entangled with and shaping access to water for survival, livelihood and/or leisure
• Decolonial, indigenous, hydrofeminist, blue humanities and other critical thinking with water for justice  in the (post)apartheid
• Indigenous knowledges, spiritualities and practices in relation to water and apartheid erasures and repression