Short Abstract

We invite ethnographic papers presenting on the experience of heat-in-context. Thermoception is mediated at the confluence of eco-socio-technical assemblages and our panel invites participants to consider gender, class, race and other dynamics in historical and current thermoceptive realities.

Long Abstract

On a planet with increasingly dynamic and extreme temperatures, heat has become a central concern in public, policy and political debates that seek to address climate breakdown. Anthropologists however have highlighted that heat is not just temperature but a socially contextualised experience. Being comfortable is a culturally normative aspiration, not just the result of climatic effects but a mode shaped by socio-cultural, political and economic processes. Ethnographically, heat provides a lens to not only think about environmental crises, but also enduring and emerging structures of inequality, colonial legacies and capitalist extractivism that manifest particularly in intimate spaces such as home.

This panel invites submissions that ethnographically document the modes in which heat structures realities, shapes discourse and (re)organises hierarchies but is also negotiated and/or mitigated. Comfort is inherently relational and inter-subjective, mediated at the confluence of eco-socio-technical assemblages and our panel seeks to elucidate these assemblages with a view to uncovering common impositions and mitigations.

Our panel invites participants to narrate grounded stories from the field, from different contexts across the world, which consider gender, class, race and other dynamics in historical and current thermoceptive realities. It also encourages participants to consider how heat is conceptualised and defined in those contexts, and whether such understandings correspond to, mitigate, or diverge from top-down driven techno-solutionism. As much as the focus is on the lived experiences of heat (or the lack of), the panel is also open to non-human-centric, creative, discursive, or visual analyses of hot encounters.

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