Paper short abstract:

This paper examines thermal ecologies and their mediation through an analysis of heatwaves in Karachi. It approaches planetarity through a focus on the materialities, conditions, and effects of thermal ecologies and planetary heat.

Paper long abstract:

In June 2015, amidst soaring temperatures, severe electricity and water shortages, and the ban on selling food and water during Ramadan, hundreds collapsed on the streets, in their homes, on buses in Karachi. On the edges of morgues and graveyards, the dead were overflowing into visible public space on the streets. Drawing on media studies, infrastructure studies, and environmental humanities, the 2015 Karachi heatwave created, what I call, “a thermal ecology” that exacerbated and reconstituted existing entanglements between media processes, urban infrastructures, and the aggravating impacts of climate change. I demonstrate that the heatwave built on existing political marginalization and environmental ruination to generate new forms of media activism, urban digital governance, and data surveillance. To develop this argument, I trace Karachi's media ecology as embedded within and conditioned by infrastructures of breakdown and repair, and histories of inequitable and violent growth that has ruined the city’s ecology. I analyze how the heatwave mediates and intervenes in forms of urban digital governance, data surveillance, and media activism. While recent scholarship attends to the tremendous heat expended by digital media infrastructures (Velkova 2016, Hogan 2015, Ruiz 2021 to name but a few), this paper examines the thermal effects (Starosielski 2021) of heat upon media ecologies and the social and ecological lifeworlds within which they are embedded. It argues that this thermal ecology and its infrastructure failure needs urgent examination, since the material force of heat is an ongoing condition and marked future of climate change for billions in the global south.