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Presentation short abstract

Explores how people with Multiple Sclerosis experience and adapt to heat through a feminist political ecology and critical heat studies lens, revealing how gender, disability, and inequality shape embodied thermal vulnerability and care.

Presentation long abstract

Extreme heat is an intensifying yet unevenly distributed effect of climate change. Biomedical research has shown that people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) are physically sensitive to temperature, but the social, embodied, and political dimensions of this sensitivity remain largely unexamined. This paper draws on Feminist Political Ecology and emerging work in Critical Heat Studies to conceptualize heat as not only meteorological but also embodied, relational, and power‑laden.

The research explores how people living with MS experience and navigate heat in daily life, and how gender, disability, and socio‑economic conditions shape what can be termed embodied thermal insecurity. It employs qualitative and participatory methods—including expert interviews, go‑along interviews, body mapping, and collaborative fanzine making—to foreground situated knowledges and strategies of care that often remain invisible in climate‑health frameworks.

The paper presents the project’s theoretical orientation and methodological design, alongside reflections from early fieldwork, including expert interviews and initial conversations with people living with MS. These first encounters offer a foundation for examining how chronic illness, care practices, and inequality intersect within the thermal politics of a rapidly warming Europe.