Paper short abstract

Through photography, thermal cameras, and participatory approaches, this presentation explores the phenomenological experience of heat in Marseille, revealing the sociotechnical dynamics and thermal inequalities shaping urban life in two marginalized neighborhoods highly exposed to heatwaves.

Paper long abstract

This proposal is part of a multimodal ethnography of thermoceptive experience conducted in Marseille since 2023. At the intersection of the anthropology of thermoception, sensory anthropology, and multimodal anthropology, I examine how residents of Belsunce and Les Crottes—two impoverished neighborhoods highly exposed to both heatwaves and cold spells—perceive and experience heat.

The research combines participatory methods, including photographic workshops and photovoice activities, with experimental devices designed to capture the affective dimension of thermal experience. It also analyzes the roles of gender, class, and race relations in shaping thermoceptive realities (Starosielski 2021; Venkat 2020; Hobart 2022).

Building on previous experiences in multimodal fieldwork (Leon-Quijano 2022), I have developed a multimodal approach to thermoception using various media and techniques, such as thermal cameras, disposable cameras, and anthotype printing. These tools allow for a nuanced exploration of the experiential, affective, unequal, often contradictory, and shifting dimensions of urban thermal experience.

In this presentation, I propose to explore a series of materials produced through this research by focusing on the analysis of one object featured in the book Strata: Unruly Ethnographies of Troubled Worlds (https://stratabook.net/). The aim is to examine the ecological and sociotechnical assemblages that shape critical experiences of heat in a city marked by deep inequalities, rapid transformation, and significant gentrification pressures. Building on this analysis, the presentation explores diverse approaches to thermoception, adopting a creative perspective to broaden the scope of phenomenological approaches in the anthropology of thermal experience (e.g. Vannini et Taggart 2014; Ingold 2007).

Paper short abstract

After an ‘upgrade’ in a housing estate in Cork in 2016-2017, which made homes more energy efficient, many residents complained that their homes were no longer comfortable. This paper presents the findings of ethnographic research which aims to understand residents’ perceptions of comfort and warmth.

Paper long abstract

Anthropologists are usually reluctant to explicitly identify ‘human universals’, but even the most circumspect of anthropologists cannot deny two fundamental facts which apply to all humans, of all cultures and eras: humans need nourishment and shelter. This paper addresses the latter of these universals. Specifically, it examines the concept of thermal comfort in relation to ongoing ethnographic research with the residents of a social housing estate in the city of Cork.

Following an ‘upgrade’ of the estate in 2016-2017, which made homes more efficient by replacing a superannuated gas boiler with modern heat pumps and installing insulation and double-glazed windows, many residents complained that their homes had become more uncomfortable. This paper presents the findings of ongoing collaborative research, between anthropologists and engineers, which examines residents' perceptions of comfort and warmth.

This paper puts the research into a broader context by examining how anthropologists have, and have not, considered the notion of thermal comfort. It also develops W. G. Hoskins’ idea of the ‘Great Rebuilding’, which describes the change that occurred in England, between the middle of the sixteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth century, whereby the majority of homes went from open, chimneyless halls to houses with multiple rooms, chimneys, ceilings and glazed windows. This paper proposes that a second ‘Great Rebuilding’ is currently underway in the West, exemplified by the ubiquity of, inter alia, double-glazing, central heating, electricity and indoor lavatories. The paper examines some of the concomitant social changes of this second ‘Great Rebuilding’.

Paper short abstract

Public schools in hot contexts are in the forefront of urban climate municipal action, and heat is an actor that plays a significant role in its development. Building from the case of a renovation of a public school, this paper explores the multiple roles of heat and its political implications.

Paper long abstract

Schools are increasingly becoming contested heated spaces in hotter countries. Due to the raise of temperatures, many facilities that where initially designed to not to be in service during the summer season, now fail to be comfortable places, for not only summers are hot anymore. In Spain, public schools are the only public buildings that do not have air-conditioning by default, and schoolyards are usually no more than a concrete slab to play football; namely, uncomfortable places. However, developing climate action in municipal bureaucratic contexts is a complex endeavour.

How is heat problematised and operationalised in public climate action? What kinds of heat are prioritised and how does bureaucracy understand comfort? To answer these questions, the paper explores the case of a renovation of a nursery school in Madrid from within building on ethnographic fieldwork developed while working as a public architect for the municipality. The paper is divided into two chapters where multiple “municipal heats” are discussed: first, the failed process of renovating the interior of the building, in particular, the air-conditioning system of the school; then, the eventually realised refurbishing project of the schoolyard. In both chapters, different “comfortable” bureaucratic responses are given by actors - i.e. public officials, external contractors, managers, and users - to “solve” the problems, yet problems are multiple, and sometimes contradictory. In concluding, the paper reflects on the political capacities of “municipal heat” as a multiple complex bureaucratic object.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Bucharest residents navigate breakdowns in the district heating system, showing how the intermittent supply of hot water and heating shapes daily routines and bodily comfort. Heat emerges as a socially and politically mediated force that exposes urban inequalities.

Paper long abstract

This paper theorizes heat as a socially and materially situated ethnographic object by examining how it is sensed, interpreted, and unevenly accessed through the everyday operation—and frequent failure—of Bucharest’s district heating system. Built under socialism to guarantee universal access to hot water and heating, the system now persists in a condition of managed decay: corroded pipes, intermittent supply and austerity-driven neglect transform heat into a fluctuating, contested force.

In moments of failure, when radiators go cold, water turns lukewarm and heating disappears for days or weeks, heat becomes perceptible through residents’ thermoceptive realities, shaping notions of bodily comfort and domestic routines. Disruptions compel improvisation, adaptation and reliance on informal networks, as households reconfigure their homes as sites of thermal resilience and negotiate normative expectations of what constitutes a dignified life in present-day Bucharest.

Yet access to warmth remains deeply stratified. Households able to install alternative heating technologies buffer infrastructural failure, while others remain fully vulnerable to systemic neglect. Access to heat thus emerges as a relational marker of inequality, showing how infrastructural failure is politically and economically mediated across multiple scales. By tracing the entanglements of thermoceptive experience, urban infrastructures and post-socialist infrastructural transformations, the paper argues that heat is not merely consumed: it is lived, negotiated and unevenly distributed. In doing so, it highlights how everyday domestic thermodynamics produce enduring urban inequalities.

Paper short abstract

While extreme heat is increasingly studied across disciplines, gender-diverse people remain systematically overlooked. This ethnography examines how transfeminine bodies experience and adapt to heat through intersecting vulnerabilities, cooling poverty, and thermal injustice.

Paper long abstract

Extreme heat is one of the deadliest yet least visible consequences of human-induced climate change, disproportionately affecting socially marginalised populations. While growing scholarship documents the unequal impacts of heat across lines of age, race, class, and disability, the experiences of LGBTQI+ communities, particularly transgender individuals, remain strikingly underexplored. This paper addresses this gap through an ethnographic study of three transgender women living in Rio de Janeiro, a city increasingly shaped by recurrent heatwaves and unequal access to cooling. Drawing on their narratives, the paper examines how transfeminine bodies encounter heat at the intersection of physiological vulnerability, social exclusion, and infrastructural neglect. It highlights how hormonal therapies, chronic stress, discrimination in healthcare, and cooling poverty compound heat-related risks, revealing forms of thermal injustice embedded in normative climate adaptation frameworks. By queering dominant understandings of heat adaptation and thermal comfort, this research contributes to climate justice debates and calls for inclusive, embodied, and intersectional approaches to climate resilience.

Paper short abstract

This paper introduces the concept of “thermosociality” to examine how temperature regimes shape social life. Drawing on ethnography from Kolyma, known for its extreme low temperatures, it shows how winter cold defines the ethics, thus positioning thermal comfort within a moral economy.

Paper long abstract

How do temperature regimes affect sociality? In this paper, I will propose the concept of “thermosociality” to account for forms of sociality embedded in the temperature regimes. As a product of modern “social organisation of thermal energy” (Shove et al. 2014), temperature and thermal comfort have been shown to affect social relations in multiple ways: high ambient temperature has been associated with generating social conflicts (Sovacool et al. 2020), fostering discrimination (Mazzone 2024), altering judgment (Behrer and Bolotnyy 2024), exacerbating inequality (Klinenberg 2002), and increasing risks of interpersonal violence (Anderson et al. 2000).

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kolyma, a region in the Northeast of Russia, notoriously known for its extreme cold and Gulag past, I extend this literature by examining how winter cold reconfigures moral and social life. I show how, during winter, reducing cold exposure to preserve warmth becomes an ethical maxim governing human interactions, and how this is translated into discourses of exceptional relational warmth popular among settlers of the Russian North. By doing so, I move beyond “dark anthropology”-style approaches to the social effects of thermal conditions, articulated through concepts such as “thermal insecurity” or “heat stress,” to reveal temperature regimes as part of a moral economy and therefore central to the diversity of social life.

Paper short abstract

Tracing charcoal from rural earth kilns to urban kitchens in northern Uganda, this presentation explores thermoception across its uneven social and material transformations that sustain livelihoods, expose bodies, and fold into everyday experiences of irregular weather patterns.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in northern Uganda, this paper examines situated thermal transformations in relation to charcoal, the predominant cooking fuel in urban househoulds across Sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis is developed through close sensory and visual attention to combustion across production and use of charcoal.

First, heat is encountered in the conversion of trees into charcoal in agricultural clearings, where young men tend slow-burning fires sealed beneath soil. This heat is later reactivated in domestic spaces, where charcoal is burned to cook food and ensure safe consumption, while also allowing women to attend to children and other household obligations during the thermoceptive process. Across these contexts, heat sticks to the skin and produces sweat that signals effort and endurance. It is a condition for nourishment and care, shaping what can be done, when, and for how long, and becoming emblematic to moral perceptions of what constitutes a good person.

Simultaneously, the heat from charcoal combustion is accompanied by smoke and fine particulate matter that enters the bodies of women and children working in close proximity. These thermoceptive processes are increasingly discussed in relation to changing weather patterns, as interlocutors describe hotter conditions and delayed rains, associating these shifts with the disappearance of trees for charcoal production.

By tracing heat across its material transformations, from tree to fuel, to food, to bodily exposure, and to climatic interpretation, the paper shows how thermoception is embedded in more-than-human assemblages that both sustain and transfigure everyday life in uneven ways.

Paper short abstract

This paper, focusing on Japan, first explores how clothing science has understood and modelled thermoception since the 70s and, second, examines its role in current strategies to tackle heat stroke cases.

Paper long abstract

In the 70s, the female professor Tamura, at one of the first editions of the Human -Thermal Environment Symposium in Tokyo, reminded a room of male engineering professors and architects of something they had overlooked: humans are not naked; humans are always clothed.

This was not obvious among engineers who modelled the body’s thermal exchange. They saw the human as a uniform, heat-generating mass, while Tamura noted that clothing causes uneven surface temperatures. To architects deciding on early air conditioning temperatures, she emphasised the importance of studying how people are dressed. During this time, the scientific study of the body-clothing microclimate emerged, transforming how thermoception and thermal comfort were valued, understood, modelled, and monetised.

In recent years, heat stroke has officially become a public health concern in several subtropical Japanese cities, prompting national and local governments to take urgent action: several programs educate on the role of clothing, the use of cooling wearable gadgets, and how to target early heatstroke symptoms with ice patches. If in the 70s and 80s the body-clothing microclimate was studied to enhance thermal comfort, now the body-wearables relationship is increasingly important for survival.

Based on ethnographic research conducted in Fukuoka with local government and citizens, and on interviews with key figures in clothing science at Bunka University, this paper first explores how thermoception has been modelled and its socio-cultural implications, and secondly examines the role of clothing and wearables in managing heat stroke risk in contemporary Japan.