Heated Planetary Futures

It's been hot lately. 2024 was the hottest year on record. The prospects for a cooling planet are dire. »Heat«, as the term of the chronic hazard suggests, is here to stay. Planetary futures are heated futures. How does heat transform socio-spatial modes of living? How does heat shape urban environments, infrastructures and economies? How do we know and feel heat? How do technologies mitigate heat and how does heat fail technologies? Taking general discussion of the anthropocene and climate crises as a point of departure, we will explore how heat has become a topic for economic geography and urban studies. We will discuss questions of thermal control, governance, and health; we will look at the intersection of heat and inequality, and problematize systems of knowledge about heat - e.g., colonial tropical imaginaries and their respective production of race, body, and climate relations. And we will examine technologies of heat, ranging from ethnographies of air-conditioned, artificially controlled thermal environments, to heat and labor in hot data centers, to the promise of heat in geothermal and solar energy. Eventually, the seminar seeks to understand heat and its capacity to shape thermal futures.