Thermal Inequalities

Professor Venkat’s new work focuses on urban heat in India. Exposure to heat has been described as a major index of climate-related inequality. In India today, rising temperatures have raised concerns about the continued viability of urban life. This project—“The Role of Sensation in the Making of Climate-Related Expertise: Thermal Inequality, Bodies, and the Built Environment in Urban India, 1858-2020”—examines how the sensation of heat—an ordinary, everyday feeling—becomes an object of expert knowledge, specifically in the fields of 1.) climate science, 2.) architecture and urban planning, and 3.) biology and biomedicine. While heat has long been an object of study in these fields, there has been little analysis of how precisely the subjective sensation of heat—as a lived and embodied experience mediated by history, culture, and materiality—is translated (or fails to be translated) into both scholarly and practical forms of knowledge-making.

Professor Venkat’s research investigates these issues through an integrated mixed-methods research program consisting of three components: 1.) archival research on colonial and postcolonial histories of thermal sensation and expertise; 2.) ethnographic and oral historical research in the Indian city of Chennai centered around embodied experiences of urban and climatic change; and 3.) a digital “thick mapping” component that correlates experiences of heat and thermal inequality with aspects of the built environment. He aims to make a novel scholarly intervention by bringing together disparate forms of heat-related experience that are rarely studied together—those of both ordinary people and experts across multiple fields—under the shared rubric of sensation. Rather than focusing exclusively on quantitative variations in exposure to heat, this project will examine qualitative differences in thermal experience by attending to how heat is constructed and construed, by whom, and under what conditions.

Through historical, ethnographic, and cartographic investigations of how heat has been experienced and understood, this project asks what an analysis of, climate-related expertise can tell us about how inequality is, organized—not only in relation to (quantitative) exposure but also (qualitative) sensation.