Paper short abstract:

Air-conditioning consumes 60% of the domestic electrical load in Bahrain. This is not simply due to Bahrain's hot climate. Rather, this paper argues that the proliferation of air-conditioning is also related to the electrical grid and the historical and political context in which it evolved.

Paper long abstract:

The abundance of air-conditioning in Bahrain is not simply connected to high temperatures but also to a particular configuration of the electrical grid. As the arrival of electricity in Bahrain co-emerged with colonial demands for cooling, it resulted in a technical configuration through which cheap and readily available air-conditioning became a key aspiration. This aspiration intensified following independence, generating a mode of citizenship predicated on comfort security. While the state maintains stability through overdesigning its infrastructures to provide uninterrupted comfort, citizens negotiate their entitlements by pursuing unauthorized cooling that compromises the grid. Infrastructural overdesign rests on the work of engineers who overestimate and reproduce cooling expectations but who can also facilitate the procurement of unauthorized overloads. Focusing on infrastructural overcapacity, this article illuminates how techno-politics can take excessive forms and how it can consequently shape everyday, sensory life.

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces how Human Rights organizations sought to concretize the systematic heat harms suffered by migrant workers in the run up to the Qatar World Cup, thereby revealing not just the contingency but also the maltreatment produced by the Qatari government's thermal regime

Paper long abstract:

Since the announcement that Qatar would host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, tens of thousands of migrant workers were hired to construct the massive amount of necessary infrastructure - including stadiums, transportation, and cultural landmarks. However, Qatar quickly came under fire from multiple Human Rights Organisations (HROs) for its long-standing abusive labour practices. While the criticism of practices such as the Kafala system are relatively well-known, this talk argues that considerations of heat played an important role in this intervention.

To publicize the phenomenon of unexplained worker deaths and chronic diseases, HROs deployed worker testimony, statistical analysis, and legal arguments to make institutionally perceptible these workers and how their deaths were being rendered invisible by the Qatari political and medical apparatus. Despite being faced with constant counter-manoeuvres by government actors, World Cup officials, and contractors, the persistence of HROs moved the needle from denial to limited acknowledgement of the issue.

However, the eventual Qatari response was not to accept full responsibility and make whole the affected workers, but the circulation of updated technocratic solutions such as new body suits and standards. Thus, the myth of thermal objectivity was shattered, but this simply opened up a new terrain of negotiation where powerful actors still possessed formidable resources to shape future thermal regimes.

Paper short abstract:

Though all-glass facades have dramatically increased overheating risks, behind them have been built controlled artificial climates for office workers immersed in a “comfort zone.” The global spread of this architectural form has contributed to climate change that now threatens its very existence.

Paper long abstract:

In the post-war period, fully glazed curtain walls were first introduced to enclose office buildings in the USA. The greenhouse effect caused by the excessive use of glass exacerbated overheating problems and increased reliance on mechanical conditioning and energy infrastructures to control indoor climates. Despite early warnings about the risk of discomfort, North American corporate architecture, with its smooth, fully glazed façade, crossed borders to shape the urban landscapes of globalised metropolises. This architecture spread across climates, creating a new class of office workers immersed in a “comfort zone” defined by the development of technologies and a thermal culture rooted in the Western modernity. This culture articulates metrics and norms that have sought to objectify thermal comfort. Today, as climate change accelerates and the risk of power outages increases, there is a renewed fear of losing control of these indoor climates. This paper traces the journey of John I. Yellott, an American engineer, from the USA to Hong Kong, and stops in this Asian city to analyse the Bank of China and the HSBC Main Building. Based on archival documents and an analysis of the physical conditions of the buildings, this paper examines this architectural history in relation to the “new climatic regime,” particularly in the light of the latest IPCC report. It finally discusses the path dependencies resulting from the construction of fossil-fuelled “thermal modernities” and explores “emergency exits,” which may mean recognising that the imperialism of Western culture has created uninhabitable heritage.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation diagnoses and analyzes a double bind faced by media investigations into thermal violence. It explores how anti-carceral activists negotiate between universalizing rubrics of objectivity mobilized to corroborate injury and the inherent subjectivity of thermal experience.

Paper long abstract:

Historically, extreme temperatures have offered carceral institutions a mechanism of corporal punishment that evades accountability. Such violence is difficult to document: carceral spaces restrict access; temperature is assumed to be natural; its effects are subjective and embodied; and they do not leave the kinds of evidentiary traces that beatings and floggings do. Recently, journalists, researchers, and activists have developed strategies of documentation and visualization to render carceral thermal violence legible as such. Projects including Susan Schuppli’s video series Cold Cases (2021) and The Intercept’s investigation “Climate and Punishment” (2022) frame the weaponization of temperature in U.S. prisons and detention centers as human rights violations. In doing so, they face a double bind: they depend on the language and parameters of thermal objectivity to corroborate forms of injury so subjective and intimate that they elude such universalizing rubrics. On one hand, these projects marshal measurements, codes, and laws to produce irrefutable evidence of thermometric harms that violate humanitarian standards. On the other hand, they reference unverifiable sensations from subjective testimonies that describe differential experiences of and vulnerabilities to heat—from punitive dehydration to medical conditions that exacerbate thermal risk to tactics that target individuals’ thermoregulatory capacities. How do—and how should—advocates negotiate between the objective physics and subjective experiences of thermal harm? Does activism toward thermal justice necessarily require the legitimating scaffolds of thermal and journalistic objectivity? Drawing on feminist theories of intimacy, this presentation will analyze how media investigations into thermal violence contend with its inherent indeterminacies.

Paper short abstract:

Exploring warmth deprivation in Chilean urban contexts, this study unveils the nuanced dynamics of "friolento/a" (cold-sensitive) experiences within energy poverty. Insights from Araucania underscore the intersection of gender, stigma, and urban planning, revealing hidden facets of energy precarity.

Paper long abstract:

My work delves into sensitivities and emotional responses to cold within the contexts of energy poverty, specifically focusing on warmth deprivation. Grounded in extensive ethnographic work conducted during the prolonged cold seasons in medium-sized cities of the Araucania region, southern Chile, the study explores the concept of being "friolento" or "friolenta" (excessively sensitive to the cold). It unveils thresholds of tolerance in everyday life and urban planning, examining how gender norms, stigma, and shame intersect with rural memories, shaping diverse experiences of the cold. The argument posits that sensitivity to the cold, coupled with emotional and physical responses, is constructed within social relationships entwined with gender dynamics, socioeconomic relations, and connections to the territory. These sensitivities appear dislocated from those typically considered in urban planning processes, offering nuanced insights into the often-overlooked dimensions of cold vulnerability specific to Araucania, Southern Chile.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation proposes two extensions of 'critical temperature studies'. The first argues for research to analyse how thermal regimes modify temporal trajectories, while the second suggests mobilising the concept of environmentality to capture the design and modulation of thermal 'milieus'.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decade, scholars in STS, sociology, anthropology, geography and media studies have proposed to attend to the cultural and social dimensions of temperatures and how they are implicated in particular strategies of power. These 'critical temperature studies' (Starosielski, 2021: 8) are characterised by three important features. Epistemologically, CTS challenge the dominant positivist understanding of the thermal as a pre-social and neutral force. Instead, they examine 'temperature' as a historical and social entity. Empirically, they cover the full spectrum of cold and hot, ranging from a 'cryopolitical analysis' (Radin and Kowal, 2017: 4) to 'critical heat studies' (Hamstead and Coseo 2020). Analytically, CTS conceive of heat and cold as technologically mediated, and their modulation offers new forms of social, biological and environmental control.

In my presentation, I would like to suggest two extensions of this research perspective. First, while the analytical focus in CTS has been on spatial configurations, geographical regions and architectural arrangements, it is worth exploring how thermal regimes also modulate and modify temporal horizons and trajectories. Second, while research interest has focused on the biopolitical effects of thermal technologies - from infrared camera surveillance, to the colonial legacy of Western temperature norms, to new regimes of making life and death available through practices of cryopreservation (Radin and Kowal 2017; Beregow 2019; Starosielski 2021; Hobart 2023) - it might be useful to mobilise Foucault's concept of environmentality to capture how humans and non-humans are governed through the design and modulation of thermal 'milieus' (Lemke 2021).

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the role of refrigerated space in the urban governance of treaty-port Shanghai. It offers a nuanced understanding of the mediations and frictions involved in the modernization of the foodway and how cooling technology empowered diverse subjects living in the cosmopolitan city.

Paper long abstract:

In Shanghai, a treaty-port city that opened to foreign trade and residence in the mid-19th century, Western-administered sanitary authorities adopted the germ theory, attributing the prevalence of diseases to food contamination. The advent of mechanical refrigeration, ensuring precise temperature control for the production, preservation, and consumption of perishable products, not only addressed the dietary needs of European expatriates, overcoming long-term prejudice against food sanitation in Asia, but also played a pivotal role in regulating the urban environment through technological rationality and social ordering.

As “native ice” from lakes and rivers was deemed a public menace, cooling plants emerged in the municipal laboratory, public markets, and the abattoir complex. Health authorities promoted household refrigerators, particularly among newcomers from nations with established sanitary regulations, alongside the popularity of the electric appliance among the Chinese upper class. While foreign administration mandated cold storage installation in food premises for sanitary concerns, Chinese authority harnessed techno-power to effectively, though briefly, reconfigure the city’s supply chain logistics. Despite local resistance against government interventions in commercial activities, mechanical refrigeration permeated the foodscape, embedding thermal knowledge and sanitary norms into everyday life and providing fresh experiences to the metropolis.

This paper shifts away from the narrative that construes cooling technology as a tool of the empire and emphasizes its unilateral enforcement in facilitating Western acclimatization to the tropics. Refrigerated spaces, as socio-environmental-technical systems, participated as infrastructure in modernizing the foodway, a process imbued with mediations and frictions contesting the incomplete cold chain, which is commonplace nowadays.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how thermal regimes shape national economies and the workforce. By analysing how far job creation drove the design of Britain's thermal infrastructure in the 1970s and 80s, it argues that warmth has been as much about keeping the population in work as preserving bodily comfort.

Paper long abstract:

Up until the second world war, warmth was a major stimulus to the British economy and workforce. In 1953 the National Coal Board (NCB) employed 713,000 miners, with roughly 20% of the coal supply used in coal fires to keep British homes warm. With the growth of gas and oil central heating in the 1960s and 1970s, the link between a distinctive thermal regime and its labour force collapsed. This paper will uncover how the (NCB) and the National Union of Miners (NUM) fought to preserve the labour-intensive nature of heat throughout the 1970s and 1980s, looking at their promotion of district heating systems as an employment generator. The NCB and the NUM actively lobbied councils, housing associations, and even provided interest free loans sacrificed from wages to establish district heating systems run on solid fuel. Ultimately, these efforts were unsuccessful as gas became the dominant heating method for British homes. The conceptual relationship between heat and work was not lost, however. Over the 1980s inner-city home installation programmes that emerged as part of the government’s energy efficiency programme stressed the importance of ‘warmth’ as a critical area of job creation. By highlighting how the battle over Britain’s thermal infrastructure was fought on the grounds of labour-intensity (and how much work warmth could generate) this paper will highlight the role of ‘thermal regimes’ in shaping national economies and the workforce.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses two DFG-funded research projects on climatic conditions in West African courtyard houses from the 1970s, exploring thermal imaginaries. It studies how on-the-ground data interacted with models in wind tunnels to construct (and counter) an objectifiable notion of comfort.

Paper long abstract:

The research projects, “Climatic conditions in West African courtyard houses” (1973–75) and “Microclimatic and climate-psychological effects, as well as constructive requirements of added storeys to West African courtyard houses” (1976–79), involved collaboration between the Institute for Tropical Building at TH Darmstadt, the Institute of Aerodynamic Studies at TU Munich, and the Faculty of Architecture at UST Kumasi. The test field was in Nima, a densely populated neighbourhood of Accra. Researchers proposed a ventilation apparatus to improve comfort inside the houses, and specific second-story patterns to increase density while maintaining proper courtyard ventilation. Models in 1:100 and 1:30 simulated the situation in a Munich university wind tunnel. The distribution of tasks reflected neo-colonial epistemological hierarchies: the researchers in Kumasi retrieved the data on the ground and constructed the mock-up second storey; models served Munich researchers for testing; both ground measurements and simulations were analysed in Darmstadt and Munich. Inhabitants were mostly seen as disturbances, impacting data collection by opening doors or switching measuring devices off. The assumption that these houses needed climatic improvements is questionable. A 1970 survey in Nima, undertaken by Darmstadt students, revealed most respondents found the houses “comfortable” or didn’t respond to questions of comfort. The survey’s failure was attributed to unclear questions or “non-objectifiable answers”. In summary, the project appears to have been based on imaginaries of thermal comfort that were challenged by the residents. Ultimately, as the proposed “enhancements” were not embraced by development stakeholders, the projects predominantly served the academic community in Germany.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on Soviet extractivism studies (Brown 2013, Collier 2011, Kochetkova 2024), the paper reconstructs how late Soviet mobile architecture was imagined and used as a method of 'acclimatisation' during the 'resourcification' (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014) of oil and gas in Western Siberia.

Paper long abstract:

In 1977, a rotational settlement from fourteen barrel-shaped wagons was erected near the Noyabrsk railway station amid the Western Siberian taiga. These mobile living units, praised by contemporaries for their ‘thermal effectiveness’ in the ‘extreme’ cold climate, facilitated the access of fly-in-fly-out workers and geologists to the oil fields of the West Siberian petroleum basin – the world’s largest physical oil deposits ‘discovered’ in 1960. Throughout the 1960s-80s, dozens of such temporary rotational settlements were erected to ensure the steady supply of labour power and facilitate inflated extractive targets, making the Soviet Union a major global supplier of hydrocarbons. Utilising meteorological and geological knowledge, analyses of contemporaneous American, Canadian, Finnish and Norwegian architecture, and observations of the material culture of the region’s ‘indigenous’ ethnic minorities – Khakass, Khanti, Mansi, Nenets, Selkup and others – the Soviet architectural establishment attempted to imagine rotational urbanism and mobile architecture as a method of ‘taming’ the climatic features of the region, such as gushing winds, permafrost, swampy soils and low temperatures. This paper critically reconstructs the epistemic hierarchies and materialisations of Soviet mobile architecture and rotational urbanism in Western Siberia during the years of the oil and gas extraction boom and across three scales – territory, housing, and construction technologies – as a politics of ‘acclimatisation’. It will do so by drawing from the archives of the LenZNIIEP and SibZNIIEP, the State Research and Design Institutes responsible for testing and providing spatial solutions for Western Siberia’s North.

Paper short abstract:

In the twentieth century, the mining industry in South Africa drove research on the limits of human physiology in high heat. Tracking NASA's use of South African research, this paper asks how thermal physiologists tested racial categories in environments that will not sustain biological processes.

Paper long abstract:

In the mid-twentieth century, South African mining companies developed the deepest and hottest mines on earth. As they moved deeper, they established new laboratories to test the limits of human physiology in high heat. This paper builds on research which examines how South Africa's mining industry tested and remade racial categories in "Tropical Africa" using surface acclimatization chambers. Tracking NASA's use of South African laboratory studies, particularly within its technical standards, I examine how U.S. contractors translated South African racial categories for reference publications. Engaging theories of racial capitalism, I further analyze how thermal physiologists reinvested in racial logics in environments that will not sustain biological processes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the concept of “thermal colonization” by examining the construction of French extractive settlements in the Algerian Sahara during the war of independence (1954-1962). It shows how the definition and implementation of a thermal normativity was key in this colonial endeavor.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the concept of “thermal colonization” proposed by Nicole Starosielski (2021) as “the use of a sense of temperature to justify colonial expansion and inhabitation.” It does so by analyzing a case study: the construction of French extractive settlements in the Algerian Sahara during the war of independence (1954-1962). I argue that the French agenda was not only about extracting the major reserves of fossil fuels discovered there, but also consisted of defining and setting a thermal normativity in the desert.

The paper analyzes how this “thermal colonization” was implemented through four steps. First, the construction by experts of the Sahara milieu as “extreme,” mainly due to its aridity and high thermal amplitude. Then, the discrediting of the habitat and practices of indigenous communities, deemed admirable but overall “backward” and non-modern. Thirdly, the setting of a comfort norm based on the physiological and psychological reactions of human bodies and minds to the desert climate, so as to guarantee their working efficiency. And lastly, the building of air-conditioned settlements in the desert, from single dwellings to entire cities, to house oil industry workers and the soldiers protecting them.

This episode played a pivotal role in advancing knowledge about comfort, air-conditioning technologies, and acclimatization to non-temperate climates, which persisted after the French withdrew from Algeria in the 1960s. It also shows that, beyond temperature, what was at play was a whole “environmental colonization,” involving a broad set of parameters defining the acclimatization of individuals to the desert.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines projects by the Montreal-based architectural firm Papineau Gérin Lajoie in the 1970s and 80s across the Northwest Territories as a response to environmentally-inflected Cold War military research in Arctic environments and on the lands of the Inuit.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the schools, laboratories, and airports designed and built by the Montreal-based architectural firm Papineau Gérin Lajoie in the 1970s and 80s across the Northwest Territories as a material response to environmentally-inflected Cold War military research in Arctic environments and on the lands of the Inuit and other northern Indigenous communities. These buildings, many still functioning today, have become darkly iconic examples of architectural colonization in the Canadian Arctic, particularly in relation to the use of polyester resin in their designs. My aim is to situate this body of work and the environmental and military research underlying its development to understand how PGL created an architecture oriented towards the mediation of thermal exposure in the pursuit of colonial settlement. Critically, thermal processes are never neutrally or objectively present as the result of ecological dynamics, but carry with them a long history of themselves being mediated by colonial processes in situ. This is the conjuncture that projects like PGL’s Nakasuk Elementary School, completed in 1976, and its now iconic prefabricated fibreglass panels articulates: a long-standing settler colonial Qallunaat (white, southern) architecture that needs to be named and understood in order to lay the groundwork for an Indigenous-defined future within the design professions and their manifestation across Inuit Nunangat (Inuit homelands).