Heat and Health: Bodies, Environments, and Unequal Thermal Worlds

Extreme heat is increasingly framed as a public-health problem: measurable exposure is linked to morbidity and increased mortality, and this nexus is addressed through epidemiological evidence, early-warning systems, behavioural guidelines, and policy interventions. This workshop sharpens the focus on health by asking how heat becomes harmful (and at times therapeutic) through historically specific social relations and material arrangements. Heat is approached as a relational and situated phenomenon emerging at the intersection of bodies, environments, infrastructures, labour regimes, technologies, and forms of governance. 

Drawing on phenomenological approaches, Science and Technology Studies (STS), medical anthropology, and neo-/new materialist scholarship, the workshop foregrounds heat as an embodied and sensorial experience that shapes health and illness, exhaustion, recovery, and care. It attends to thermal experiences and the various ways they are mediated by building materials, clothing, ventilation, shade, water, tools, urban surfaces, infrastructures, and cooling artefacts such as green spaces, as well as by everyday tactics of coping, pacing, resting, and enduring. Rather than conceiving of the body as a closed biological unit, the focus of interest is how heat shifts bodily boundaries, exposures, and capacities, reshaping rhythms of work and rest, and producing uneven health outcomes over time. 

The workshop situates contemporary heat-health paradigms within longer historical and sociocultural trajectories of thermal bodies and climatic medicine, shaped by (post-)colonial medical and labour regimes, racialised and gendered assumptions, and uneven infrastructures of care. While extreme heat is undeniably a major driver of illness and premature death, heat has also been used historically and contemporarily for therapeutic purposes; from climatic and balneological medicine to heat treatments and practices of warming, sweating, and detoxification. Harm and therapy are examined as historically co-constituted and unevenly distributed. Such perspectives denaturalise present-day health metrics and guidelines, historicise and pluralise current conceptions of heat and health, and foreground heat as a form of slow, often normalised violence that accumulates unequally across bodies. 

A further focus lies on how heat is politically defined in health governance: is heat framed as a risk, a hazard, an emergency, or a background condition of everyday life? How do these classifications shape responsibility, and which bodies are rendered protectable? The workshop analyses the effects of these definitions on policies as well as on lived experiences of health and illness.