Co-Affective Encounters with the Great African Seaforest

Abstract This contribution focuses on our co-affective encounters with the Great African Seaforest in Cape Town, South Africa. We use a diffractive methodology to read Blue Humanities and marine biology texts through critical posthumanism and our freewritings and depictions of our embodied co-affective encounters of swimming and diving in the kelp. Swimming diffractively through such texts, our freewritings and images, we consider how the focus areas identified in the call for papers (CFP), namely sentience , imaginaries , regeneration and pedagogies, might be differently configured and understood through the Great African Seaforest. In keeping with the interconnected hydrological cycle of which we are all part, we consider the Great African Seaforest as a Global South “sentient interspecies learning community” (CFP) for broader global politico-ethico-onto-epistemological practices and relations. We argue that such diffractive immersive encounters of transdisciplinary approaches and creative expression can enliven embodied environmental Critical Forest Studies learning in novel ways.