Tamara Shefer is the first lecturer of the RIKK – Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference lecture series on intersectionality in spring 2024. Her lecture is titled „Hydrofeminist scholarship in/through/with South African oceans, bodies of water and liminal watery edges“ and will be held at 12–13 on Thursday 25 January, at the National Museum of Iceland.

This lecture speaks to a recently published volume entitled Hydrofeminist Thinking With Oceans: Political and Scholarly Possibilities (Routledge, 2023). The book showcases contemporary work of South African-based scholars and activists that are currently thinking with ocean/s and other bodies of water for challenging critical social and environmental injustices. The volume offers rich global Southern contributions and situated narratives to decolonial hydrofeminist thinking. Hydrofeminism, coined by Astrida Neimanis (2012), serves as a primary lens within the book which is characterised by intersectionality, trandisciplinarity and multi-modalitity, particularly foregrounding participatory active engagements and collaborations of art and activism. In the lecture Tamara Shefer shares some of the innovative projects that are in the book and emerging from South African contexts more broadly in thinking with the sea, other bodies of water, marine objects and critters, and liminal spaces of beaches. These include a range of embodied, affective and relational engagements including: walking and swimming methodologies; research-creation; hauntological approaches; artistic practices such as poetry, photo-essays and theatre.

Tamara Shefer is Senior Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town. Her scholarship has been directed at intersectional gender and sexual justice, with particular emphasis on young people. She is currently engaged with re-conceptualising academic knowledge with emphasis on embodied, affective, feminist, decolonial pedagogies and research, including collaborations across art and activism and thinking with oceans and water.

Further information on the lecture series can be found on RIKK’s website – rikk.hi.is – and the institute’s Facebook-page. A recording of the lecture will be made available on RIKK‘s website and Youtube.