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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses “urban heat maps”, which link practices of experiencing and monitoring heat as well as exposure, affectedness, activism, and intervention towards heat, as a multimodal mode of doing anthropology, and how such maps can be mobilized as commons, as well as living repositories.

Paper long abstract:

Collins, Durrington and Gill (2017) invited to a “Multimodal Anthropology” as a project that links different media, agents, and types of knowledge in modes of collaborative and public anthropology. This contribution presents “urban heat maps”, which bring together practices of experiencing, monitoring, and mapping heat as well as exposure, affectedness, activism, and intervention towards heat as such a multimodal and collaborative mode of doing anthropology. The paper is based on the ERC-project “Urban Vibrations: How Physical Waves come to matter in Contemporary Urbanism”, which addresses the questions how human and nonhuman urban dwellers are exposed to heat, noise and 5G, how (multispecies) bodies learn to be affected, and to which activistic practices and interventions into urban spaces being affected can lead. Heat, noise and 5G are invisible and indeterminate phenomena in their ontologies as well as in their effects. Their multiplicity and twistiness but also the multiple and complex responses on these environmental, anthropogenic and electromagnetic waves - such as monitoring, mapping, scaling, policing and policy-making by multiple and various agents - argue for a multimodal research approach. This paper discusses the collaborative development of “urban heat maps” between various exposed bodies, research partners, (para-)ethnographers and scientists as a form of by all of these agents in-situ developed “fieldwork device” (Estalella & S. Criado 2018), and it thinks about how these collaborative, multimodal “urban heat maps” can be mobilized as commons, and open and living repositories.