Tracing the multiple temporalities that seep into my body through the watery memories of childhood, through my womb as a place of life and labour in my early twenties and into my salty hair, I find myself floating in False Bay, South Africa as a doctoral student. My own experiences and inheritances of racism, the folding, unfolding and refolding of structural relations of power force different relations with time, memory, place and research. I follow questions which murky the waters of research practices and meet Camissa. How then can “learning to live with ghosts” in Camissa, haunted by racial and spatialized exclusions (Derrida, 1994/2006, p. viii), uncover invisible questions about displacement, racism and its relations with memory and place? The figuration of Sea-Place, is here used to do justice to the response-ability of be-coming researcher. As a figuration, it is about unboundedness and emphasises the porous nature of time, place, memory and research. As a figuration, Sea- Place shifts the stable nature of research and pollutes the singular ways of thinking about the world. Its appearance in brown is an articulation of its entanglement with my skin. Colour matters. My skin is brown and I see, feel and sense myself as a porous brown body, situated in salty waters. As I re-turn to memories and events in time, my brown skin follows.
Author(s)
Joanne Peers