Jennifer Mae Hamilton

How long does academic work take? How long should it take? Even more troubling, who gets to decide what is valuable and necessary work for an academic today?

I’ve been in therapy for nearly half a decade and I’m only now re-connecting with aspects of myself that I tried to leave behind. Still, now, in my late thirties, I find myself too embarrassed to look back. From where I stand, it is heroic to relive the emotional and physical experience of being teenage again and braver still to write and publish a memoir about it.

If it is the job of a phenomenologist to describe conscious experience, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology does so in a way that collapses the distinction between one’s psychic life and one’s material situation. Its author, Astrida Neimanis, challenges us to reimagine how individual human bodies—constituted of approximately 70 per cent water—are thoroughly implicated in the planetary hydrocommons.