Saltwater Field Notes extends the work of Saltwater Reasonings into writing.
Some posts sit alongside specific episodes, staying with ideas that surfaced in conversation and required more time to settle. Others emerge between episodes as fieldnotes on method, care, pedagogy, and the everyday labour of knowledge-making. These reflections are places to pause, return, and think with what has been shared.
Counting Sand, Walking Memory: Saltwater, Return, and the Ethics of Relation
In October 2024, while attending a conference, I visited the Elmina Castle, a slave fort on the Ghanaian coast.
As the conference participants rolled off the bus, there was a charge in the air, a kind of excitement that made something in me tighten. A friend on the trip chose to stay on the bus, opting out of entering the fort. I didn't want to stay. I needed to go in. But I also didn't want to participate in the slavery tourism all around me: the packaged experience, the rehearsed narration, the purchase of proximity to pain.
Small Talk as Threshold: Consent, Relationship & Research Practice
In research and professional settings, small talk is often treated as peripheral. Efficiency is prioritised, and moving quickly to questions is framed as respect for time.
In this post on Saltwater Field Notes, I reflect on small talk as something far more consequential: a threshold where consent, trust, and relationship begin to take shape.
Embracing Caribbean Knowledge: Liming, Ole Talk, and Research as Relationship
Embracing Caribbean Knowledge: Liming, Ole Talk, and Research as Relationship. Liming and ole talk shape how Caribbean communities have always made meaning together. In the second Saltwater Reasonings conversation, Camille Nakhid reminds us these everyday practices are rigorous research methodologies: grounded in trust, cultural continuity, and the deep ease of speaking as we already do.
Reasoning as Relation: Opening Saltwater Reasonings with Yentyl Williams
“The body is evidence.”
That phrase, offered early in my conversation with legal scholar Yentyl Williams, has stayed with me. We were speaking about epistemic trust and the ways Caribbean people are often encouraged to doubt their own knowledge, histories, and bodily knowing. Her words named a refusal of that doubt.