Overlapping currents: navigating (anti)colonial water geographies via geopoetics

How can creative approaches contribute to geographical understandings of - and responses to - watery places transformed by colonialism, racial capitalism, and ecological crisis? The aim of this fellowship will be to engage with this question by developing and sharing key findings from my PhD thesis. Titled 'Overlapping currents: watery geographies, Black and Indigenous poetics, and the Anthropocene', the thesis offered an interdisciplinary approach to poetic work that engages with watery environments in Turtle Island/North America and the Pacific islands, from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean to lead pipe infrastructure in Flint, Michigan, and from streams diverted by the sugar industry in Hawai'i to militarised coastlines in Guahan.

I develop innovative approaches to connect poetic methods to spatial politics in multiple forms, including place-based performances, activisms, and interventions in water infrastructures. My key findings include:

1. Creative practices can pay attention to how watery places are made, maintained, and transformed environmentally and socially. Poetic work can connect and juxtapose multiple discourses and perspectives on place - from environmental impact reports, to oral narratives about marine life, to anti-colonial demands for demilitarisation - and also generate different imaginaries.

2. Poetic engagements with watery places (including oceans and rivers, canals and pipes) offer ways of perceiving how the impacts of colonialism, racial capitalism, and environmental degradation in these places are durational and non-linear. Poetic work can approach watery places formally as well as thematically, using a range of techniques to move across multiple spatial and temporal scales.

3. The ways that water circulates through bodies and geographies is shaped by colonial and capitalist infrastructures and has racialised and gendered impacts. My 'overlapping currents' approach attends to material relations within and between watery geographies and dynamics of power that organise them.

4. Black and Indigenous feminist and queer approaches mobilise creative methodologies to understand and transform ongoing interconnections between colonialism, racial violence, heteropatriarchy, and environmental degradation. These bodies of work open up generative dialogues - and tensions - with geographical scholarship.

I will use the fellowship to share these findings with multiple audiences, and to enhance the practice- and field-based and collaborative elements of my research. The most substantial output will be a monograph based on my PhD thesis, titled 'Overlapping Currents: Watery Geographies and Poetic Bearings beyond Colonial Racial Capitalism'. The second half of the book project will be supported by a small amount of new research in Hawai'i, building on a planned and funded research trip during my doctoral research that could not go ahead owing to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The research will enable me to engage in greater depth with key poetic interlocutors and sites from my thesis and to develop collaborative relationships that will shape future research. While in Hawai'i, I will share and receive feedback on my work at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting.

I will also increase my work's impact by presenting at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS-IBG) Annual Conference, publishing blog posts and interviews in public venues, and designing and delivering public engagement activities including a workshop on anti-colonial poetics of water in collaboration with the National Maritime Museum (UK) and a Hawai'i-based poet. I will build capacity in emerging researchers working with creative geographical methods by running a pilot workshop and contributing to postgraduate teaching in Geography at RHUL.

I will also work towards the next steps of my academic career by applying for a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.