1 ‘This thing that we do’: In pursuit of hope-full renewals through hydrofeminist scholarly praxis Jayne Osgood, Middlesex University Vivienne Bozalek, University of Western Cape Abstract In this paper we dwell amongst what was agitated from enacting Neimanis’ (2012) hydrofeminism in an ‘aqueous-body-writing-reading’ experiment that unfolded in discrete but entangled locations (London and Cape Town) to actively disrupt and reformulate ideas about what it is to do scholarly work. We consider how we might dislodge Anthropocentric ways of knowing, being and doing through our swimming-writing-reading. Aligned with emergent hydrofeminist scholarship our unruly writing experiment has - over seven months of alternating seasons on two continents - involved exchanging, diffracting, and curating words that e/merge together. The multiple, interwoven stories told in this paper are a direct challenge to what and how knowledge gets produced, by whom, where, and for what purposes. Working with wit(h)nessing; contact zones; and radical openness, our speculative, enmeshed, multispecies praxis offers glimpses into the possibilities that exist in porous spaces to generate knowledge differently in the spirit of hopeful renewal. Key words Hydrofeminism, swimming-writing-reading methodologies, feminist posthumanism, wit(h)nessing; contact zones Emergence of an Anti-extractivist Praxis In this paper we tell stories: the story of how this piece came about; stories of the intra- connections 1 between swimming-writing-reading 2 ; stories of hopes for renewal from the depths of the Anthropocene and what this might mean for feminist scholarship and the field of gender and education. To tell these stories we share glimpses into our praxis that are attempts to make more tangible the ways that feminist swimming-writing-reading differs from other forms of knowledge production. Central to our project has been a commitment to articulate sensibilities that are core to our experiment with different ways of doing and being ‘an academic’. Thi s has been a strange, vulnerable, joyous and at times exhilarating journey that has shifted and mutated how we encounter politics, ethics, ontology and epistemology through everyday, often quotidian watery encounters. This emergent praxis has demanded generosity, curiosity, delight and 1 We use the word intra-connections rather than interconnections following Karen Barad’s (2007) neologism intra-action which connotes the ontological inseparability of phenomena, such as reading-swimming-writing, rather than their pre-existing status. 2 We present our aqueous praxis inconsistently and interchangeably as ‘swimming-reading-writing’, ‘writing-reading-swimming’, ‘reading-writing-swimming’ ‘aqueous-body-reading-writing’ etc to convey the ongoing intra-connections and symbiotic relationalities between these strands of activity.