Tides of Care: Engaging a Sensory Ethics and Transmateriality in Avenues for Global Climate Action.

In exploring the labyrinthine nature of life and being, writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges reminds us that nothing is quite as it seems. As living beings, we inhabit worlds and materialities that often go unacknowledged — realms that resist the rationalist frameworks and modernist ideologies to which we are expected to conform. Recent ethnographic research (2022–2024) in southern and eastern Africa reveals deeply embodied, affective, and transmaterial human-ocean relations—indicating that a sensory ethics and openness to transmateriality may offer new, globally relevant philosophies toward more inclusive climate action. Ethnographic data collected in South Africa and Kenya illuminate the sensory and transmaterial dimensions of coastal life – suggesting that at least, for southern Africa, climate action and biodiversity protection should involve less body distant, textualized approaches to ocean management and environmental care. The discussion engages theoretical perspectives from Feminist Political Ecology, sensory ethics, and Black Planetary Studies to foreground the multidimensionality of environmental care in Africa. The human-ocean relations described are affective, physiological, and spiritual, showing that intimate, embodied knowledges of nature, seasonal attunement, and affective labour are central to practices of coastal resilience. In responding the theme of 'axioms of dead-ends and new possibilities', this paper proposes the undoing of colonialism as philosophy in Africa to pursue new forms of oceanic kinship and place-making that entangle human and more-than-human life in ways that challenge anthropocentric and masculinist epistemologies. The author argues that there are new, more hopeful possibilities for humanity in decolonial, futurist feminist futures of living 'with' nature, rather than managing it. The discussion presented engages with both sensory ethnography as well as more textualized responses to mitigating climate change, indicating the discursive power of the latter and the marginalisation of the sensory aspects of coastal existence. A key argument is that a democracy of the senses would allow for more body close, and thereby decolonial approaches to the critical issue of global climate change.