I started thinking about swelling horizons when encountering the work of Territorial Agency and their https://ocean-archive.org/collection/49. After presenting some thoughts at the 2024 Venice symposium on Metaphors organised by the wonderful team at the Ca’ Foscari University, I published a piece titled Swelling Horizons: Coloniality, Sea-Level Rise, and their Otherwise.

Abstract

‘Sea-level rise’ is widely used to denote the severity of climate change. This article argues that the concept is also shaped by a colonial grammar of relating to the ocean while its use may affectively standardise frontline communities. To reorient such ways of relating to aqueous catastrophe, the article dwells on the concept of ‘swelling horizons’. Noticing the swells of late-liberal horizons generates an _otherwise_ which prompts reorientations; in-between terrestrial horizons and submersive thought, attentive to multiple times and spaces, prepositionally resourceful, and attuned to the racialised heaviness of climate coloniality.

'Swelling' continues to prickle at thoughts and sounds when I work through problems of planetary change, warming bodies (watery and otherwise), but also uteruses, queer livelihoods, and community life.