Presentation short abstract

We conceptualize super-vulnerability of migrants to urban heat to be shaped by intersectional patterns of "othering" and oppression, operating at individual, institutional and structural levels, and expressed through four key domains: housing, employment, healthcare, and urban infrastructures.

Presentation long abstract

Heatwaves are increasingly framed as a public health emergency, yet dominant approaches rely on meteorological indicators and epidemiological metrics that obscure how heat is differentially lived, felt and endured across social groups. We advance a critical heat justice perspective by centering heat as an embodied, socio-political, and place-based phenomenon. Drawing on feminist, critical urban, and environmental justice scholarship, we develop an analytical framework that conceptualizes the super-vulnerability of migrants to heat as a dynamic and relational condition shaped by intersectional and historical patterns of "othering" and oppression (along lines of class, race, religion, migration status or gender) and operating at individual, institutional and structural levels across Europe. These are expressed in four key domains surrounding everyday life: housing, employment (formal and informal), healthcare, and urban infrastructures (hard, soft and social). To assess how far existing literature captures these dynamics, we conducted a scoping review of empirical studies on heat-related vulnerability in European cities focusing on migrants and racialized populations. Our findings indicate that evidence of disproportionate exposure and health risk is growing, but vulnerability continues to be operationalized through reductive proxies such as neighborhood deprivation or income, with limited engagement with racism or migration as structuring forces. Moreover, few studies explicitly theorize heat as an embodied experience or address the role of institutional neglect, labor precarity, and racialized housing pathways in producing “super-vulnerability” for migrant groups. We argue that reframing heat as a justice issue is essential for making visible the political conditions under which exposure is produced and sustained.