Often on a weekend here in Cape Town, I will head to the beach, book in hand, and settle under our parasol. It is, by any measure, a very good way to spend a Saturday – and yet every time, it feels slightly unreal. An amazing beach right in the midst of my “home” city!

The parasol is bright and cheerful against an almost aggressively blue sky, and every time I look at it, I am reminded that I do not really know this light yet. Not in my body. Not in the way I know the particular grey-white of a Swedish February sky, or the exact quality of the darkness in December when it arrives at three in the afternoon and changes everything – how we cook, how we move, how we are.

This might sound like a minor observation. But for a sustainability researcher, it is actually quite a significant one.
Within sustainability science, there is growing recognition – drawing on the work of thinkers like Karen Barad – that knowing, being, and doing are not separate activities. Barad calls this etho-onto-epistemology: the idea that how we know is inseparable from how we are, and from how we act in the world. We do not first exist, then learn, then do. We know through being, and we are through doing.

This resonates far beyond the academic page – and very tangibly so in the everyday life of a researcher who tries to walk the talk. At home in Sweden, my research and my life are deeply entangled. I grow and craft. Forage and restore. I salvage. I know every tree and rock along the paths I walk again and again. I feel the seasons change not just in the temperature but in myself – in what I do, how I think, what I reach for. We are different in winter, and we live different in winter. My knowing of the landscape is embodied, accumulated, relational. It took years. It is still growing. It might be my life’s most important work.

But I got a fellowship in Cape Town, and moved across the planet.

Here, I am – to put it plainly – a tourist. A long-term tourist perhaps, but in many ways a tourist nonetheless. Cape Town is well acquainted with people like me. The city receives a constant flow of tourists and digital nomads – people who are here, but not quite here; who reside without putting down roots, who engage without necessarily being accountable to place in the way that living somewhere, over time, demands. I am largely, for now, one of them.

Every plant on my walks is a new encounter. We are strangers to one another. I do not know their names, their habits, what they need, what they offer, which season makes them come alive. I do not know these lands and waters, their multiplicities, their lives. I cannot be, know, and do here in the same way as at home – because the slow, accumulated entanglement that makes that possible simply does not exist yet. Those encounters emerge, carefully, over time.

This matters beyond the personal. Cape Town carries a profound and painful history, and within contemporary thinking about co-producing research for change, positionality is everything. Who I am here, what I should and should not be doing, who I should be doing it with – these are not background questions. They are constant, necessary, sometimes uncomfortable companions. As an outsider flying in, my presence and my research practice require ongoing reflection, negotiation, and humility.

So what does an action-motivated sustainability researcher do when she finds herself temporarily unmoored from the relational ground that usually holds her thinking together?

She does water works.

I am not entirely sure yet what to call this (it is, in doing and thinking, an ongoing labour). But here is what it looks like: I collect water. Cupfuls here and there. I save it from taps and pots. Gather the expelled water that moves heat through the pipes in our walls (at least on the days when I can’t quite stomach a cold shower). Rescue unavoidable waste and what might otherwise be wasted. And I carry it out into our little shared garden. I balance buckets and repurposed storage boxes filled to the brim, moving carefully so as not to spill what I have gathered. Pour it here and there. My load lightening as I work. On the wet surfaces of these makeshift vessels, a slimy mould finds its own life – and I clean it off, and it returns, and I clean it off again. I water where life looks dry. And then I watch what happens.

The tale of Cape Town nearing Day 0 in the back of my mind.

Water works in quiet resistance to the irrigation system that runs every morning, remotely controlled, beyond our reach – a small but telling manifestation of being a visitor, of having agency over fewer things in the place where you temporarily live. If we are responsible for almost nothing here, do we really live here? Or do we merely reside?

In doing the water works, being in it, I learn things. I realised that the dry patch on the lawn is not only dry because the irrigation does not reach it – it is also because every afternoon, a flock of guinea fowl arrives to sand bathe there. They scratch up the sandy soil and dust their feathers over and over. I have started collecting the feathers they leave behind. Reading about them. Getting to know them, slightly. Their loud cackling travel across the globe as I make phone calls to home. We are building, slowly, a relationship.

This is, in its own unremarkable way, what it looks like when knowing, being, and doing refuse to stay separate. Barad’s etho-onto-epistemology does not announce itself grandly here – it shows up in buckets and feathers and dry patches of lawn. The small, daily, embodied acts of reaching toward a place that does not know you back (yet). The water works are not solving anything. They are not research, exactly. But they are a way of being here more fully, of resisting to merely reside, of beginning – however tentatively – to take responsibility for a small patch of life in an unfamiliar land.

Back home, I know which berries ripen in August and which paths flood in spring. That knowledge took a long time and a lot of living. Here, I am starting from scratch. I carry water. I collect feathers. I look up at a sun umbrella against a blue sky I am only beginning to know.

A drop in the ocean.