Respecting local knowledge keepers through cellphilms featuring local water bodies: towards decolonizing water management

We engage with the global water crisis while contributing to decolonization in higher education through a university water curriculum that foregrounds relationships and ways of knowing water beyond academic and technical expertise. In this paper, we explore the questions: how might the processes of storytelling – between water bodies, knowledge keepers (KKs), audiences, and students through cellphilm creation and sharing – enable respectful relations and knowledge transfer? We define ‘knowledge keepers’ as people who have an existing relationship with a particular water body and whose knowledge and expertise with respect to the water body emerge from lived experience and not academic scholarship or technical training. How might this contribute to the decolonization of water management? We provide insights into and analyse a graduate curriculum enacted in South Africa where students, through encounters with local KKs and water bodies, made cellphilms presenting their own water narratives and screened these for the public. ‘Cellphilms’ broadly refers to films made on phones, and are often used as a participatory visual research method and in teaching (MacEntee et al. 2016). When used in education, cellphilms have revealed elements of agency through enabling participants to be cultural producers with a tool they access every day – their cell phones – and through opportunities for self-reflexivity that reveal the ‘poetics of everyday’ (Mitchell & Sommer 2016: 20). Here, cellphilming is a research method for exploring learning experiences for students and KKs, and the resulting cellphilms become places of knowledge transfer for course convenors, students, KKs, and public-event audiences.

This paper expands on the understanding that we can tap into water's knowledge – ‘thinking with water’ (Neimanis 2017) – by focusing on the transformative potential of site-specific water mapping practices. Specifically, we apply Chen's (2013: 292, 279) concept of ‘mapping situated waters’, through mapping ‘implicit or explicit’ relationships ‘among landscapes, waterways . . . human and more-than-human [populations], and other lively agents’. Chen (2013) situates colonial mapping practices as territorializing capitalist mechanisms imposed on water. Rather than representing the water as a silent entity, we follow Chen's efforts to include the water as integral to map-making as knowledge co-production. We expand on this by including various water users in the map-making process. Acknowledging that ‘relations of watery community [are] rich with entangled forms of life’, Chen (2013: 294) argued that a sense of response-ability towards watery places, and each other – understood as part of the hydro commons – can emerge through ‘an ethics of environmental community’ (Chen 2013: 275). The course we outline hereafter aims to make space for such an ethic.

While Cape Town survived the prospect of being the world's first major city to reach ‘Day Zero’ (insufficient municipal water service) in 2018, its ongoing struggles around water access remain. Many of the city's poorer (predominantly non-White) communities live without regular water access (Ntseku 2020). The situation is not unique to Cape Town and is expanding worldwide. In Canada, for example, for decades, approximately one hundred long-term boil water advisories were in effect in First Nations communities (Suzuki 2018). Access to clean water is an issue that trumps most others, and the racialized nature of water inequality globally requires consideration.

Higher education plays an important role in water access and management, as universities are colonial architecture that perpetuate epistemic violence (Heleta 2016) through capitalist-colonial logics of universality that monumentalize verbal and written knowledge (Santos 2018), and through ‘colonial affective logics’ (Zembylas 2021: 10) that reify colonial power relations. These same logics breed commodification logics that perpetuate environmental racism and epistemic injustices.

The Republic of South Africa's higher education was crafted by ‘apartheid thinking’ aimed at ‘the disenfranchisement of the African majority’ (Bunting 2006: 35). A 1984 constitution mandated that higher education institutions (HEIs) be racially designated: 19 for whites; 2 for coloureds; 2 for Indians; and 6 for Africans (Bunting 2006). Historically black universities, initially with authoritarian cultures, were strategically created to train a population to serve the state but eventually became ‘sites of struggle against the apartheid regime’ (Bunting 2006: 45). Following the end of apartheid, a new Higher Education Act in 1997 aimed to transform higher education (Bunting 2006), but implementation challenges, and neoliberal global market influences (Andersen 2003) have created a legacy of coloniality entrenched in HEIs; this is particularly true regarding epistemic hierarchies.

This paper draws on Mgqwashu's (2019: 64) definition of decolonizing education as dismantling ‘pedagogical practices and classroom traditions that evolved in the west to favour the elite while marginalising the majority’. Tuck & Yang (2012) argue for decolonization that is substantive and not metaphoric, including designing a curriculum that intentionally reveals settler colonialism. Being researchers rooted in institutions of ongoing settler colonialism demanded that we reflexively consider our positionalities, and heed calls to ‘actively undo [colonial]…ways of thinking’ towards ‘a more ethical ecology’ (Trisos et al. 2021).

Battiste (2017), a Mi'kmaw scholar of decolonizing education, argues for including more diverse ways of knowing in teaching and learning. What do those ‘ways’ look like? Since knowledge systems are embedded in cultural systems (Crawhall 2009), it is impossible to generalize about their specifics. Several scholars suggest that ways of knowing, across diverse cultural contexts, can be categorized as (1) relational (Forsyth 2017); (2) story-based (Adjei 2007; Archibald 2008); and (3) land-based (Wildcat et al. 2014). In addition to the mind, these three ways engage emotions (Brown 2004), intuition (Barrett & Wuetherick 2012), and spirit (Smith 2012), which have historically been discounted by Western philosophers (Adjei 2007). Since these ways of knowing the link to unconscious, non-verbalizable phenomena (see Santos's (2018) ‘anti-cognitivism’), we view this as implicit knowledge.

We co-convened a graduate-level course called Making Waveforms. The course engaged students in producing site-specific cellphilms of local water bodies.

The course began with a workshop where students were introduced to the concepts of dominant narratives and counter-narratives. Abrams (Author2) led students through a ‘map-your-waterworld’ drawing activity she had developed, linking theoretical discussions around water and relations to everyday experiences. Students learned to use an audio recording app and went on a group field trip to explore soundscape recording hands-on. Then, students visited water bodies to conduct audio mapping assignments.

Next, students received a lecture as an introduction to film language and a videography approach called ‘slow media’. The ‘Slow Media Community’ is a concept developed by Cree/Metis filmmaker Gregory Coyes that consists of a community of filmmakers engaged in a filmmaking method that employs what Coyes refers to as an ‘Indigenous sense of cinematic time and space’ (Van Borek 2019: 32). Students learned to use video recording apps through a filming activity, and a video mapping assignment at water bodies. To deepen our shared relationships with water, the class went canoeing together on a wetland, led by one of our KKs who runs a canoe club in a South African township. As inspiration, we pointed students to resources offering accounts of local, historical Indigenous water myths and legends. Students then met with KK's at water bodies using photo elicitation (Harper 2002). We invited KK's to bring found or existing photos to the meeting that reflected their waterbody relationships and to speak to these, empowering KKs to identify matters of concern and guide what was shared before inviting students to ask further questions.

Students were invited to develop a water narrative in the form of a cellphilm, inspired by whatever emerged from these experiences. As students reworked their narratives, guest lecturers from non-academic backgrounds enriched creative thinking, contributing to the course's ‘ecology of knowledges’ (Santos 2018), through life-experience stories of water insecurity and social impact storytelling. A workshop in impact strategy supported students in creating games linked to their course learnings. A final workshop engaged students in a body mapping exercise that required reflection while illustrating their relationships to water through various body parts. The course culminated in a public screening event that invited the public to view and provide feedback on the cellphilms, ask questions, and participate in games, building on cellphilm themes.

We selected four water bodies: the Liesbeek River, Zandvlei, Hout Bay Estuary, and the Khayelitsha Wetlands. These water bodies intersect with diverse social, cultural, and economic demographics across the city. Four KKs contributed: (1) a Khoisan descendent who grew up around the Hout Bay river; (2) a long-standing volunteer with the Zandveli Trust stewardship group who grew up alongside the Zandvlei; (3) two employees who had worked for over 10 years with a Liesbeek river stewardship organization; and (4) the co-founder of a local kayak club and neighbour of the Khayelitsha wetlands.

Empirical data was generated through (1) teacher–researcher (the authors') reflective observations; (2) student questionnaires prior to and interviews after course completion; (3) students' reflective journals; and (4) cellphilms. These last two were deliverables within the course. The students in the course included six Master's students from environmental and geographical sciences and three working professionals. Prior to registering for the course, students were informed that their work might be used in research publications. This was reiterated to students at the start of the course when they were invited to voluntarily sign informed consent forms. Students were advised that participation in the research was optional and that choosing to not participate in the research would not affect their class evaluations. All nine students who participated in the course consented to their work being empirical data. Eight cellphilms were made and included in the analysis.

Indigenous scholar Archibald Q'um Q'um Xiem (2008) detailed the implicit knowledge that emerges in storytelling through her theoretical framework for making meaning from stories and respectfully integrating Indigenous storytelling into modern educational contexts, which she refers to as ‘storywork’. Archibald's (2008: x) storywork ‘educates the heart, mind, body, and spirit’ by making these four parts work together. Archibald's (2008) concept of ‘implicit text’ indicates that implicit meanings are important and that storytelling is relational; meaning is made from stories through the inter-relationships of the storyteller, listener, story, and context. Meaning-making practices include ‘. . . gestures, tone, rhythm, and personality’ and the listener ‘going away to think about [the story's] meanings in relation to one's life’ (Archibald 2008: 17, 90). Stories can ‘become the teacher’ (Archibald 2008: ix). We extend our concept of storytelling from an individual, oral story, to cellphilm.

Working with storytelling, implicit knowledge, and affectivity are essential to our goals of enacting a decolonial pedagogy. This paper uses ‘diverse ways of knowing’ to refer to ways rooted in Indigenous and broader African traditions, beyond Eurocentric modes of academic reading and writing. How can implicit ways of knowing be valorized by the academy, or, better yet, can the academy's dominant epistemologies of the North (Santos 2018) be decentred by their inclusion? Since knowledge representation is essential to knowledge transfer in a teaching and learning environment, and since the relationship to representation is what privileges explicit knowledge over implicit knowledge in the traditional education system (Schilhab 2007), we focus on exploring non-verbalizable, implicit knowledge and how it may be co-produced through storytelling in cellphilms.

To apply this theoretical framework to interpret our data and draw on methods in qualitative data analysis, we looked at the explicit content of the cellphilms, in terms of the soundbites of statements by KKs that students selected to place in their cellphilms, and the meaning produced by the order in which students edited these statements together. We then looked at the implicit meanings in the cellphilms by observing and describing the non-verbal elements included (e.g. images, music, sounds) and the meanings and emotional affect(s) produced through their juxtaposition. We then reviewed students' questionnaires, interview transcripts, and reflexive journals to triangulate our findings.

We found, in the cellphilms and engagements between students, KKs, and the public, that different values and understandings of water emerged. Our course activities worked to de-centre technical experts as primary water knowledge holders. Our photo elicitation process shifted colonial power relations to more lateral relations in research, teaching, and filmmaking. We analysed students' cellphilms to outline these different types of values and understandings. For example, one student chose to co-construct a representation of the watery place in a way that reinforces its value beyond being a commodity. This suggests the importance of these types of non-commodity-related values. Cellphilms produced openings for affective relations of critical aesthetic appreciation and empathy for water. A public screening event contributed to the decolonization of higher education through investment in alternative affective infrastructures. The course provides students with exposure to new layers of ways of knowing water, disrupting standard approaches to learning, understanding, expertise, and research. We support these claims in more detail below.

Students were tasked with two mapping site visits to water bodies; one with sound and one with video. Mapping assignments included explicit instruction to listen and look for water aesthetics (sound characteristics of rhythm, timbre, volume, etc., and visual qualities of texture, colour, movement, etc.). One student pointed out that the act of audio-visually mapping water bodies implied there was something worth seeing and hearing from the water body. The semi-structured mapping assignments required carefully chosen artistic approaches known as soundscape recording, where one directs a microphone to record sounds in an environment and slow media where the camera is fixed in position and where the cellphilm-maker becomes a witness to the dynamic movement that unfolds within the frame. Both approaches fine-tune the maker's perception to water's cues, positing water as a storyteller.

Ruth Brain's cellphilm Zandvlei (2019) is an emotive tapestry of visual textures, colours, and movements that are woven together: multi-directional streams intersecting at the tideline; reed shadows dancing across a mosaic of sand pockets left by water. Brain described how Zandvlei's aesthetics ‘had all these emotional connections like peace and calm’ which could support peoples' ability ‘to celebrate through aesthetic pleasure’. By using the slow media approach to fine-tune her attention to water's aesthetics (non-verbal, implicit ways of knowing), Brain produced an alternative relationality with the water that moved away from the colonial-commodification logics of valuing water primarily for human consumption, towards relating with water as storyteller and collaborator in artistic production; as well as water as a healer (e.g. eliciting peace and calm). Brain's critical aesthetic appreciation for water is conveyed through her choice of a smorgasbord of aesthetically engaging visuals of water, inviting viewers to shift their affective relations with water. This valuing of situated waters for knowing disrupts the colonial logic of universal knowledge.

Daniella Davies's cellphilm The Language of Water (2019) positions water as a character by combining slow media visuals focused on water aesthetics with voice-over of diverse people representing water through making statements such as: ‘Look away. I'm not what I should be’ and ‘Help me. I'm hurt’. Re-centreing the narrative around water as a character – a subject, not just an object – de-centres standard narrative forms and ways of knowing, instead highlighting how water-student encounters can produce implicit, affective learning. Davies's critical aesthetic appreciation and empathy for water can be felt through the inclusion of voice-over statements such as ‘I need you to heal me’, which disrupt notions of the silenced and so-called unintelligible nature of water while framing water as a character. Davies states, ‘I think people care more when they realize that they're hurting a living being’. This contributes to water justice by challenging commodification logic and, instead, suggesting that water should be valued as a living entity. This supports decolonization by making water seen and heard, or ‘intelligible’ despite the colonial-capitalistic practice of implying its unintelligibility.

As these examples illustrate, this process of audio-visually mapping water bodies invited students to move beyond verbal and written knowledge (monumentalized by colonial education systems) to, instead, learn through the creative engagement of their senses with water – water became the site for shared understanding and offered windows into relations.

Students met in small groups at their water body with KKs – chosen by course convenors because of long-standing relations with water bodies. We consider these encounters, which took place at water bodies, as the next layer to mapping situated waters, where places and relations were ‘made and remade with each narrative’ (Chen 2013: 276). KK's were invited by convenors to meet students to share their experiences related to the water body, and – with their permission – were filmed with an understanding that this material may influence and/or be integrated into students' cellphilms.

What they shared, what issues they highlighted, and which part(s) of the water body they drew attention to, were left to the KK to decide. Course convenors proposed to KKs that they share photos related to topics of importance, as part of a photo elicitation process. They all agreed to this. Including these non-academic perspectives in the course and referring to them as ‘knowledge keepers’ was a strategic move to imply the value of their knowledge, further disrupting certain ways of knowing over others. As part of a relational approach to the curriculum (Wortham & Jackson 2012), the encounters between specific people at a particular place and time were curated, while the relationality was left open to evolve and be expressed in the storytelling interactions emerging from these engagements. This was intended to shift the relational context.

Our photo elicitation process disrupted typical researcher versus researched power dynamics, colonial forms of knowledge exploration, and conventional filmmaking power dynamics. For example, one KK shared a picture of a snake he had a relationship with. A student meeting this KK expressed disappointment at this, as it did not offer the story or knowledge they were hoping to ‘get’. The student commented, ‘he chose pictures that were not related to water’. The cellphilm produced by this student suggests that, after their meeting, the student is able to make the connection between the snake, Zandvlei, and how the Zandvlei-as-non-human-habitat afforded non-human–human relations (implied as valuable by this KK's decision to bring this photo to the students' attention). The student's critical empathy for the KK's relationship with the snake and Zandvlei is suggested by her focus on overcoming the nature-culture binary in her cellphilm. She said, ‘I wanted to see how connection … between nature and humans created a more integrated sense of the environment being inclusive of humanity’. We use ‘critical empathy’ to suggest that the student experienced the KK's emotions, thereby gaining affective knowledge and learning from the KK to understand the relations within the KK-student-water storytelling encounter.

While photo elicitation was key in aiding the transfer of knowledge that exists beyond words (Mitchell & Sommer 2016), students derived implicit learning from KKs' emotions and how they related to them. Applying Archibald's storywork principle, the meaning was made relationally through the combination of the KK, the students, and the context; with the students then each going away from the encounter to make meaning of the story in relation to their own lives. This process can be illustrated by focusing on the encounter between KK, Crowster, and three students at the Hout Bay estuary, where all students experienced/documented the same story yet produced very different cellphilms, each with implicit text.

Fatima Holliday's The Hout Bay Estuary (2019) challenges the dominant narrative of nature as separate from humans, inviting viewers to reconcile with the river as part of themselves. Holliday explained how, when meeting Crowster at the water body, she enjoyed watching his facial expressions when sharing photos, through which Holliday said ‘nostalgia … hope … [and] his love came across’. She acknowledged how his perspective came from a ‘different place of living’ referring to racialized class differences, where he was directly ‘affected by pollution and the low quality of [municipal] services’, and how listening to his life-experience story ‘touched [her] heart’. This critical empathy for Crowster and the river and estuary, developed through the encounter, can be seen through (a) the way she respectfully represented Crowster in her cellphilm; and (b) acknowledged her complicity in water pollution while activating her response-ability in water protection.

Holliday's cellphilm features Crowster framed while sitting beside the estuary in the traditional documentary style of ‘expert’. He begins by sharing that he has lived in Hout Bay for 43 years and grew up next to the river. This implies that lived experience and one's relationship(s) with place are valorized as knowledge in the cellphilm.

By contrasting aesthetically pleasing visuals of the estuary with Crowster's statements such as: ‘kids don't swim … here anymore because of the pollution’ and ‘we don't have that connection with it anymore’, Holliday advocates for the protection of water through inviting audiences to affectively (re)connect with it. Through the situated water mapping apparatus of the student-KK-water body-photo-camera, these mutually respectful and interconnected relations were made. These multimodal and affective ways of knowing contribute to decolonization by disrupting the colonial logic of written and verbalizable knowledge.

Khada Ghedi Alasow's cellphilm Unreachable Waters (2019) challenges the dominant narrative of water shortage being due to scarcity by implying access to water is exclusive and, while once racially-driven, is now economically-driven. Alasow's inclusion of the following explicit statements from Crowster: ‘people need to decide if they want buildings or water’, and ‘In Africa … water is a very precious source of life…’ suggest that Alasow felt empathy for Crowster through surfacing his issues around water access. Crowster's ‘different place of living’ implied a position of exclusion in relation to the decision-makers he referred to (e.g. ‘people need to decide’) who ‘manage’ (or control) this water access. Alasow's critical empathy was exemplified by her decision to draw attention to this issue in her cellphilm. Alasow's mapping of situated waters revealed ways that water was being made silent and invisible, highlighting water's implicit knowing and being in the mapping process, which, in turn, contributes to decolonization.

Kathrin Krause's cellphilm Sweet and Salty (2019) emphasizes the ecological significance of the Hout Bay estuary hidden below water surfaces and is interwoven with GoPro footage that takes viewers inside what is hidden. Including Crowster's statement, ‘I used to swim in the river … I used to … fish in the river with a little net as a kid, but I didn't understand what damage I also did as a small boy’ suggests that Krause was affectively impacted by Crowster's acknowledgement of his complicity in river pollution, and how this was rooted in childhood ignorance of the river's significance to non-humans. Krause's critical empathy for the water, fish, and Crowster, which emerged from her encounter, is illustrated through her efforts to highlight the ecological significance of the estuary. Incorporating informative explicit text such as, ‘ … making estuaries among the most productive natural habitats in the world’ offers the implicit text of estuaries being valuable as habitats for diverse non-humans. Explicit text reading ‘Many estuaries are focal points for intensive human activity and in these, there is a constant threat of ecological degradation’ implies Krause's acknowledgement of her complicity, as a human, in threatening non-humans' habitats. A de-territorializing of the water body and an understanding of the relations of the watery community emerged – including the KK, the more-than-human, the water, and herself. The student-camera-water interactions – visuals above and beneath the water surface – contribute to decolonization by showing water's playful involvement in this mapping process.

While the course was a success, there were some challenges and limitations to this course and study. This was one course offered at one institution in Cape Town, South Africa. It was an iteration of a similar curriculum tested twice previously in the context of Vancouver, Canada as part of Van Borek's (Author1) doctoral research. However, its success throughout Africa and globally will require scaling up across geographical and institutional contexts. Because the course was offered as an optional, free short course, instead of within a formal degree programme, it was not afforded institutional resources such as computers for video editing and IT support. This meant students were required to use their laptops and free software, however, some of the laptops were not equipped for intensive graphic work and students occasionally experienced software crashes. We also had one student who did not produce a cellphilm due to technical and personal barriers beyond the reach of the course. It was important for us to meaningfully include that student in the final screening event without drawing attention to their not having a cellphilm to present. We did so by having them join a group activity presentation focused on the water body they had engaged with and ensuring that they joined the cohort at the front of the theatre for the final curtain call. The short course schedule overlapped with some students' degree programme requirements, which meant not everyone was able to participate in every aspect of the curriculum and so the overall course experience across students varied slightly. While this curriculum may work effectively as a module within an existing degree programme, our experience has shown that such programmes are often already intensive and so creating space within such programmes to integrate other types of learning is essential. These challenges and limitations are important considerations for anyone taking up all or part of this curriculum.

Our free public screening event aligned with Mitchell et al. (2017) ‘pedagogy of screenings’ where sharing visual creations with an audience created (implicit and affective) learning opportunities, highlighting the importance of interactions. The event took place at a publicly-accessible space run by a non-profit organization in Cape Town. By bringing together academia and a range of the public, the event invited attendees to de-invest in the affective infrastructure of the colonial university campus (with its particular architecture and gatekeeping processes, including registration fees), instead investing in a more inclusive, non-commercial ‘third space’ (Bhabha 1994). Screening students' cellphilms interspersed with interactive games, designed and facilitated by students, positioned students as public educators and the audience as active participants in knowledge co-creation. Shifting colonial power relations typically found between teacher–student and the university–community was a form of investing in alternative affective infrastructures. This investment was further reinforced by the institutional culture of the learning environment; here we strove to create space that embodied affective alternatives to a capitalist-colonial future: collective play, fun, community connection, and joy.

Screening students' cellphilms created openings for affective relations with water that disrupted capitalist-colonial-commodification logics that purported water's value as contingent on the extent to which it could serve humans. Showcasing local water bodies on the big screen implied both their importance (e.g. as an artistic collaborator, storyteller, and non-human habitat) and their inter-connectedness with the students and audience (through their shared situatedness in local watersheds). Cellphilms provided openings for the audience to feel critical aesthetic appreciation for water (e.g. cellphilm Zandvlei); and critical empathy for water (e.g. cellphilm the Hout Bay Estuary). We argue that the ‘critical’ aspect of these affects includes the possibility of audience members recognizing their own complicity in the health of their city's water through the understanding that these are local water bodies that they interact with directly or indirectly. One person explicitly verbalized their affective takeaway:

Dis-investment of colonial affective infrastructures also took place through producing an affectivity of ‘active hope’ around students' abilities to positively impact the future. ‘Active hope’ is a practice rooted in action and intention rather than optimism, and creative solutions to the environmental crisis are likely to emerge from it (Johnstone & Macy 2012). The enthusiastic audience responses made a significant impression on students. One student said, ‘seeing peoples’ responses created a sense of hope’. A second student said she ‘realized it touched people, that they'll spread that, and that [gave] her hope’. A third student confirmed that ‘engaging the public made her excited that creative output can have a social impact’.

In this paper, we applied theories in Indigenous storywork, decolonization, mapping situated waters, and thinking with watery places to analyse a graduate curriculum enacted in South Africa. Through encounters with local KKs and water bodies, students made cellphilms presenting their own water narratives and screened these for the public. The embodied, multi-sensorial learning that took place through the various situated mapping/storytelling processes with water enabled non-verbal, critically affective knowledge to be present in ways that might influence behaviours towards more respectful relations with water by producing expressions of water as an intelligible and visible living being; co-producing knowledge; and expressing affectivity through audio/visual aesthetics connecting us all in a watery community.

Bearing in mind some of the challenges and limitations to this study discussed above, along with some of the non-traditional approaches to this curriculum that may be unfamiliar ground for some HEIs in South Africa and beyond, we offer some recommendations on how to apply these techniques. If you are considering integrating aspects of this into a university programme, we recommend finding a suitable department to host the course; carefully considering the target students and their availability; and ensuring you have the basic technical support needed to ensure a smooth experience for students to record and edit cellphilms. You may consider offering a course similar to this one at your institution, or you may consider taking one or more techniques and applying them in a different context of water research or water management practice. For example, a water stewardship organization might coordinate a public slow media cellphilming event as a fun public engagement process to draw public awareness to a water body. Water scholars might consider introducing photo elicitation and local KKs into their qualitative research practices to ensure a broader range of perspectives. Water activists might consider hosting a screening event and facilitating the creation of community action plans during such events. Screening events could be planned as a catalyst for distinct groups, such as water policy-makers.

The growing global water crisis, involving competing values and diverse perspectives, demands a variety of expertise and knowledge to be included in water governance (essentially decolonizing water management practices). Our work provides evidence to suggest that the variety of methods we used in this course can benefit communities, communication, and partnerships in such a way as to support the decolonial efforts relevant to the South African context.

One year after the course, student Holliday confirmed that the course inspired her to create an educational Instagram video series about herbal plants, and shifted her perspective from seeing water as a resource to seeing water as a living being: ‘I've connected deeper with so many elements of nature since doing the course, ‘cause I feel that I can see things that I never saw before. I'm always thinking about how to represent the…water body with respect and as a living being’. This approach contributes to decolonization for HEIs by disrupting Eurocentric ways of knowing, and by engaging with alternative affective infrastructures. Given universities' role in breeding commodification logics that perpetuates environmental racism, this decolonial practice may help to ensure more equal access to clean water for all, and a deeper awakening to our watery selves. As Holliday attested about her self-transformation from the course: ‘So many questions were raised about myself…and I've been thinking about it… Trying to reconcile with every bit of myself’.

All relevant data are included in the paper or its Supplementary Information.

The authors declare there is no conflict.