Aaniyah Martin
Aaniyah Martin is an intersectional environmentalist, scholar and creative practitioner based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her work explores water as a site of relation, memory and care, engaging strandlooping, hydrofeminism and collaborative coastal practices as forms of relational intelligence. She is particularly interested in how knowledge is produced through movement, listening and embodied encounter, rather than extraction, classification or territorial control. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the DST-NRF SARChI Chair in Blue Humanities and Gender Justice, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape.
Aaniyah holds a PhD from Rhodes University, where her research focused on co-creating a pedagogy of care for Southern Africa’s hydrocommons. Her doctoral work examined the deep and ongoing relationships that Black and Brown communities hold with water, foregrounding practices of care, refusal and belonging that persist across colonial and contemporary regimes of dispossession. This research continues to inform her creative-critical writing and place-based practice along South Africa’s coastline, and in dialogue with other littoral and riverine worlds across the Global South and beyond, where coastal communities are similarly entangled with histories of extraction, survival and more-than-human care.
She is the founder of The Beach Co-op, a South African initiative that brings together coastal clean-ups, environmental storytelling, collective learning and creative practice. For over a decade, The Beach Co-op has worked with communities, scientists, artists and educators to care for coastal environments while questioning dominant narratives of conservation, waste and stewardship.
Alongside her research and creative practice, Aaniyah works within feminist and decolonial leadership spaces as a faculty member for Homeward Bound and a founding fellow of Women for the Environment in Africa. This work informs her attention to collective care, gendered and often invisible labour and the ethics of knowledge-making across environmental and technological contexts.
