Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Jorge Martin Sainz de los Terreros
(HU-Berlin)
Elisabeth Luggauer (Humboldt University Berlin)
Aalok Khandekar (Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on the uneven transformative materializations of heat across different ecologies. We invite conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions paying attention to how heat (re)entangles bodies, materials, and devices, and induces new thermal practices, knowledges and concepts.
Long Abstract:
In terms of physics, heat is a transfer of energy. Since all life happens in thermodynamics, heat is ubiquitous. Although receiving increasing attention within social sciences and STS, heat remains empirically, methodologically and conceptually hard to grasp. As an agentive thermal energy, it affects and transforms materials and bodies – human and nonhuman (Ong, 2012). Heat materializes through its conductive, convective and radiant transformative interactions with different materials and bodies, as well as in its effects in socio-material formations (e.g. Oppermann et al 2019; Khandekar et al 2023; Luggauer & Martín Sainz de los Terreros 2023). Depending on their thermal properties, materials and bodies overheat, dry out, melt, dissolve, change their shape or state, expand, evaporate, disintegrate, burn or break down. And, as capitalogenic global warming accelerates, heat increasingly affects the very possibilities of cohabitation on earth in starkly uneven ways (e.g. Stensrud & Eriksen 2019; Goh 2021).
This panel focuses on the uneven transformative materializations of heat in different ecologies of e.g. densely built cities, deserts, wetlands, forests or agriculturally used land. We invite contributions from perspectives such as:
1. How heat enacts (re)entanglements of human and other-than-human bodies, buildings, materials, air, land and soil.
2. How heat mobilizes new modes of “learning how to be affected” (Latour 2004) and transforms knowledges and practices related to thermal properties and thermoregulations.
3. How thermal transformations involve using and adapting objects and technical devices (e.g. for cooling, heating, insulating, ventilating, etc).
4. How heat problematizes and operationalises modes of planning, designing, building, living and governing different spaces.
5. How heat can be rendered researchable, for example in modes including ethnography? How might it transform crucial conceptualisations in STS-scholarship of e.g. ‘entanglement’ (Barad 2007), ‘materialization’ (Murphy 2006), ‘disaster’ (Fortun & Morgan 2015) or ‘risk’ (Callon, Lascoumes & Barthe 2011).
Accepted papers:
Session 1Aalok Khandekar (Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad)
Short abstract:
This paper describes key methodological considerations and strategies to develop interdisciplinary and multi-scalar understandings of urban heat in ways that can account for its causes and impacts distributed across space and time.
Long abstract:
This presentation describes methodological considerations and strategies developed to apprehend heat in urban slums in the city of Hyderabad, India. Two understandings oriented our research: following disaster STS researchers, even as we remain attentive to the proximate effects of heat, it is also important to understand heat as a “slow” disaster whose causes and impacts are distributed across space and time. As a consequence, heat research must track heat beyond acute episodes of extreme heat to understand seasonal variations and their effects over longer time periods. Second, in order to produce impactful knowledge, heat research in “southern city” contexts must devise strategies to produce multi-scalar understandings of heat (from city, to neighborhood, to community, and to the individual) in the absence of reliable publicly available data. Against this background, we developed an interdisciplinary analytical framework that drew on social, natural, and building science approaches that combined fine-grained insights into individual experiences of inhabiting particular thermal spaces with meso-level understandings of the built environments being inhabited, enabling us to produce locally actionable insights. A key emphasis is also on developing methodological toolkits that are replicable and relatively affordable in other southern contexts as well.
Margherita Tess
Short abstract:
In overheated urban spaces in Fukuoka, Japan, the increasing use of cooling wearables mediates citizens' daily routines, comfort, and health. Considering cooling wearables' evolution from space cyborg tools to their popularisation, I explore heat adaptation within and beyond air-conditioned spaces.
Long abstract:
Over the past decade, Fukuoka, Japan, has experienced unprecedented summer temperatures, setting new records, with a projected increase of 60 additional hot days per year by 2100 (Mabon et al., 2019). In the framework of this climatic shift, this paper investigates emerging practices of cooling in urban spaces through the use of wearables.
Drawing on an eight-month fieldwork conducted in Fukuoka, I delve into how cooling wearables, such as neck fans, fan vests, ice rings, and thermoelectric cooling rings, mediate daily practices of working, dwelling and moving within heated urban environments. This paper traces the genealogy of cooling wearables, from their origin in the 1960s as tools for space cyborgs to their contemporary commercialisation for everyday use. While initially developed for therapeutic purposes and human enhancement in extreme conditions like sports, military, and strenuous labour, there has been a recent shift in focus towards making these technologies available to the general public, thereby altering their biopolitical significance to cater to the daily routines, comfort and health of ordinary individuals.
Simultaneously, I argue that the emphasis on managing body temperature rather than altering the ambient air is ingrained in the practices of coping with overheated urban environments in Japan. This paper contributes empirically to ongoing discussions in the social sciences regarding heat adaptation (Venkat, 2020; Opperman et al., 2022; Roesler et al., 2022), shedding light on practices that operate within and extend beyond air-conditioned spaces.
Jorge Martin Sainz de los Terreros (HU-Berlin)
Long abstract:
During the spring and summer months, heat is ubiquitous in Madrid; it spreads everywhere, and affects every aspect of everyday life. However, when it comes to being affected by it within bureaucratic work, heat seems to be taken for granted. As soon as public officials reach their desks, heat is not over the table. Still, heat is clearly considered a public issue, and the way of tackling it seems also “clear”: more greenery, more trees, more NBS, more shades, less asphalt, and so on. Yet the engagement with and implementation of such measures are far from ordinary institutional work.
The aim of this paper is to understand in which ways heat is taken (or not) into account when it comes to develop the institutional work done by public officials in a municipal administration such as the Council of Madrid. Based on fieldwork developed around a course for public officials called “Climatic Action in Public Places”, the paper investigates the gap between the creative, imaginative and innovative ideas developed by public officials in the course (where they are proposed speculative exercises around climatic solutions for the city) and their reluctance to incorporate such thinking processes in their own ordinary work.
The hypothesis presented here is that multiple epistemologies of heat emerge in different institutional contexts and situations, and public officials problematise and operationalise them accordingly. Hence, the questions are what those different epistemologies of heat are and how they are articulated between imagination, everyday life and everyday work.