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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.

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.