Divers | Joanna Newsome Review

From a talk given at the Maison Française Photoliterature Seminar, Oxford, 22 November 2017.

Springer eBooks, 2012

Core Messages • Diving is an activity that can cause serious and longlasting problems to the skin. • Allergic reactions to diving equipment are mainly due to rubber chemicals. • Cnidarian stings are the most frequently encountered injuries in the aquatic environment. • Dousing vinegar is the most important first aid measure after contact with cnidarians. • Bacterial infections from the aquatic environment need specific antibiotics. • The healing time for wounds inflicted in the water can take 2-3 months.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2014

It has been two decades since Haraway spoke about the ‘promise of monsters’, and seventy years since a novel kind of sea monster was created through the Aqua-Lung, giving ‘underwater worlds’ better access to humans. By revisiting and examining the combinatory effects of these historical moments, this paper illustrates the ‘promise of scuba divers’ who are somewhat monstrous in their potential to disturb common ideas about being human and life on land. In exchanging ‘sacred ground’ for submersion beneath the sea, scuba diving redefines the limits of human experience and emphasises the historical and largely forgotten primacy of land-based coordinates in theorising human life. Under the sea, these coordinates are vastly altered so that even preconscious markers, like breathing, are transformed through a circuitry that includes humans, science, technology, and nature in a ‘body-incorporate’. ‘Immersion’ becomes a threshold beyond which humans and nature, society and space are discovere...

Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, 2015

'Standing on the edge of the abyss; Shigeyuki Kihara, catalyst for change' (2015) by Maia Nuku published in Broadsheet Visual Art + Culture Journal

This research focuses on communicating sustainable tourism in the diving scene of Bonaire. For diving it is important that marine life is sustained and protected, otherwise diving would not be as interesting as it is. For Bonaire this is really important since this island is almost fully dependent on diving in the tourism sector. Bonaire is seen as divers‟ paradise because of its pristine marine life. Bonaire is a small island near the coast of Venezuela and is part of The Netherlands Antilles. It will become a part of The Netherlands in October 2010. Bonaire is, as many Caribbean islands, dependent on tourism to get some financial revenue. The island is focused on dive tourism. A sustainable way of developing the island is therefore almost inevitable. Sustainable tourism and intercultural communication are the theoretical concepts of the research. Two concepts that have a special interest to me. Sustainability is getting more and more important these days. Since we, as the world, encounter more and more problems of our pollution. And since I have a bachelor in Tourism Management my knowledge lays in that field. In a globalizing world cultures meet more and more, therefore intercultural communication is getting increasingly important. The research question is formulated with the above mentioned context and theoretical concepts; How does the tourism industry involving Bonaire communicate sustainable tourism and what role do cultural differences play in the communication between the different stakeholders? The research is conducted on Bonaire. I have gained my data with observations, participant observations, informal conversations and recorded interviews. During my stay on Bonaire I interviewed people that are important in the diving and/or tourism industry. While diving I could see for myself how the dive resorts communicate sustainable tourism to the tourists and talk with other tourists. Furthermore I became friends with people that work in the diving industry. In that way I could collect data through informal conversations. During the field research I found out that Bonaire is not a sustainable tourism destination at this moment. Bonaire uses sustainability in their marketing campaign. That is why people get the image of Bonaire being a sustainable destination. In fact this idea is only based on the Bonaire National Marine Park, which consists of all waters around Bonaire. However Bonaire is planning to implement several activities and programs in order to create a sustainable destination. Help from The Netherlands is needed to solve the two huge problems that pollute Bonaire‟s nature. Firstly Bonaire has a dump site where all garbage is dumped, nothing is separated or removed from the island. Secondly Bonaire also lacks a proper sewerage system. How the tourism industry is communicating sustainable tourism was not researchable because of the lack of sustainable tourism and the lack of proper communication. However I have encountered cultural differences between the stakeholders in tourism. These cultural differences and different interests of the stakeholders result in bad communication. In order to create a sustainable tourism destination Bonaire needs to implement more sustainable ways of operating and create better communication between all stakeholders.

Focusing on the leisure practice of scuba diving, I examine how ’touch’ works as a sense experienced through material engagement with the aquatic world for both physical and metaphorical effect. Technologically facilitated and environmentally positioned, scuba diving brings together the distal and the proximate to produce a particular experience of space and a particular mobilisation of emotion. The paper positions itself within the conceptual context of embodiment in order to consider corporeality in terms of its visceral and material capacities that effect and direct movement, as well as the experience of the sensuous via an engagement with the diving environment. In doing so, it draws upon work within the social sciences that has acknowledged the importance of an embodied engagement with environments that are seen as therapeutic or restorative for their ability to instil a sense of well-being and calm through a re-centering of the self. Drawing out the meditative capacities of scuba diving, the paper considers the aquatic world as, for some divers, a therapeutic landscape.

Azealia Banks's 2012 Atlantis music video garnered attention for its use of imagery that borrowed its visual aesthetic from a group of internet artists who identified themselves as " seapunk. " Banks released the video months after seapunk's originators had declared the scene dead and she herself responded to questions about her style by saying " seapunk isn't real, you know? " Starting at Banks's declaration of fakery, this article considers Atlantis in the context of the first four songs of the rapper's Fantasea mixtape, which map a space/sea continuum that uses Afrofuturist signifiers but also frustrates the future-oriented teleology of Afrofuturism. This frustration works as what Sylvia Wynter calls " embattled humanism, " which extends beyond a conception of Afrofuturism that combines the vision of a future elsewhere with the commitment to a present struggle over what it means to be human.

MAP Magazine, 2018

SPECTRES OF THE DEEP Mother Tongue review John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea at Talbot Rice Gallery, 21 October 2017 - 27 January 2018

2012

This paper investigates the boundaries of a journalistic category that typifies the French- speaking press, namely the faits divers, of which the approximate equivalent in the English-speaking press would be human interest stories. Bourdieu defines faits divers as journalistic discourses whose only function is to create diversion from what really matters, that is, socio-political issues (Bourdieu, 1996). I challenge this conception through the analysis of a case where journalists have politicized a fait divers and have used it to heighten awareness of a social problem. Certainly, the failure of these journalists’ attempts demonstrates that Bourdieu is right to define faits divers as a-political news. For all that, the case shows that faits divers cannot be dismissed as pure diversion, as they fulfill functions that other journalistic discourses do not take charge of. Bourdieu’s critique stems from his contempt for the logic of emotion that is at work in the fait divers and fails to recognize that the narrative of the fait divers presents a crisis of causality that can inspire a reflection on human condition. Going back and forth between theories and the case study, the paper raises the question of definition, in terms of nature and function, of this journalistic genre.