RGS-IBG 2023 CfP: Just Urban Thermal Geographies

RGS-IBG 2023 CfP: Just Urban Thermal Geographies 

With temperatures rising globally, the effects of increased heat are felt acutely and intensely across cities and urban regions in ways that put the conditions for urban life under increased strain and even threat. This session asks how rising temperatures impact on urban life forms, past and present, and seeks to explore how geographers might contribute to advancing urban climate justice, by focusing on heat. The session responds directly to the Chair’s theme, Climate Changed Geographies, by considering how temperatures are changing our disciplinary engagement with urban environments and thus, how thermal fluctuations and mediations in cities change the kinds of thermal geographies we might investigate.  With an interest in exposing how thermal power is mobilised to exercise forms of governance and violence, Just Urban Thermal Geographies builds on work that untangles the differential effects, experiences and knowledges of urban heat, historically and currently (Anwar et al. 2022; Baviskar, 2022; Frazier, 2019; Hafeez and Fatima 2022; Schwartz 2017; Starosielski, 2022). 

We invite work that exposes the landscapes of inequality that result from the differential exposure of bodies to the adversities and threats posed by a heating planet; or work that foregrounds the elemental condition in which bodies become variously exposed to the effects of heating and where capacities to respond, adapt and adjust to its fluctuations are variously constrained. With an interest in nurturing geographical work that advances more just transitions for urban environments, Just Urban Thermal Geographies invites contributions that foreground affirmative accounts of people and urban communities’ improvisational capacities to adjust, adapt and deal with the changing elemental conditions of urban living. These can be academic papers or other experimental ways of documenting, registering and rendering heat transformations, for instance, through collaborative partnerships with practitioners, professionals, artists, or activists, or through radical readings of colonial archives to re-write thermal histories. 

We particularly welcome abstracts from early career researchers and are keen to facilitate online participation.  

Potential interdisciplinary themes related to urban heat: 

• Changing practices of rendering heat governable through measurement, quantification and anticipation  
• Histories of thermal regulation in the context of colonial expansion and violence.
• Experimentation with thermal media and technologies to alter, harness, and transform heat to various ends. 
• The construction and mobilisation of heat within architectural design and urban planning, e.g. to contain and control (bodies in) urban and interior environments.
• Artistic and creative writing practices that engage with questions of heat to render the effects of heat on bodily life tangible. 
• Conceptualisations of urban justice in the wake of extreme temperatures. 

Please send your abstract (250 words max) to us by 12pm 23 March 2023 

Best wishes, 

Casper Laing Ebbensgaard (c.ebbensgaard@uea.ac.uk), Kavita Ramakrishnan (k.ramakrishnan@uea.ac.uk), and Martin Mahony (m.mahony@uea.ac.uk) 

References 

Anwar, N.H, Khan, H.F. Abdullah, A., Macktoom, S., and F. Aqdas (2022) Designed to Fail? Heat Governance in Urban South Asia: The Case of Karachi: A Scoping Study. (Cool Infrastructure, Life with Heat in the Off-Grid City Publication, UKRI). 

Baviskar, A. (2022) The Social Experience of Heat: Urban Life in the Indian Anthropocene. The India Forum (https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/social-experience-heat-urban-life-indian-anthropocene) 

Frazier, C. (2019) Urban Heat: Rising Temperature as Critique in India's Air-conditioned City. City & Society 31(3): 441-461. 

Hafeez, A. and A. Fatima (2022) Weather Wisdom in Sindhi Literature: Capturing Weather as a Force of Imagination in Shah Jo Risalo (Cool Infrastructure, Life with Heat in the Off-Grid City Publication, UKRI). 

Schwartz, S.W. (2017) Temperature and Capital: Measuring the Future with Quantified Heat. Environment & Society 8(1): 180-197. 

Starosielski, N. (2022) Media Hot and Cold. Duke University Press. 

Published: 03/20/2023