The future of work is hot. Literally. Unpredictable seasons, droughts, floods, warming temperatures, rising seas, and a host of other climatic factors are changing what work is, what it means, and what it does to the body. These effects are unevenly felt across geographies and forms of difference.

These effects spill out beyond the factories, fields, and construction sites scholars conventionally associate with legible acts of labor. Self-employed or “informal” workers in cities face new threats from the compounding factors of rising heat and air pollution. Ecotourism sectors, from alpine resorts to the rising sea-levels of tropical shores, have been reconfigured to make climate crisis, extinction, and other consequences of planetary change into sites for “disaster tourism” and consumption. A low-paid service industry coalesces around climate dystopia.

Zero-carbon energy projects, from elaborate “smart cities” to humbler solar technologies redraw the spaces and meanings of work, and in the process, what it means to think and organize collectively. Design and engineering innovations in cooking, construction, and cooling technology have financialized climate crisis. But these technological efforts to “fix” the environment and to compel people to work more and longer have environmental fallouts. More resource use, more carbon emissions. Further, an attention to top-down techno-fixes to make work bearable and communities inhabitable, elide the creative acts of experimentation and improvisation within vulnerable communities that may lead to new working relationships and forms of non-capitalist value.  The bodily effects of heat and work are newly burdening women, who disproportionately perform unremunerated, devalued reproductive labor in domestic spaces. They now must care for the ill-effects of work on a heating, polluted planet—the failing kidneys and debilitated lungs and bodies of husbands and sons.

Questions about the future of work in the context of climate crisis, then, are as much about techno-fixes as they are about home and family. They are as much about urbanization as they are about villages, towns, and remote sites of extraction. Plantations, mines, roads, as well as an ever-growing service sector that comes on the back of the collapse of production, in climate sensitive regions.

From the impact of net zero targets on energy systems to the impact of acute heat waves on health, climate change is driving innovations in thermal technologies and infrastructures, as well as innovations in the thermal properties of materials and built environments. While social scientists have identified the uneven effects of global warming on populations across the world, the rapid rollout of new heating and cooling technologies has raised new questions, from the possibilities for labor organization in transnational thermal supply chains to the equity of “smart” design in built environments.

To date, there has been limited anthropological engagement with the question of how the thermal future is actually made, and the social and economic trade-offs that it might require. Collaborations between anthropologists and the designers, architects, engineers, and mathematicians who work on thermal innovations remain rare. This panel invites scholars whose work engages questions of the thermal future from any subdiscipline or geographical area.  Together, we ask:

What kinds of social, economic and ecological value is being created in this emerging thermal economy, and for whom? How is a push for thermal efficiency balanced with an ethical commitment to climate justice? How do designers, policymakers, and practitioners reconcile differing disciplinary and cultural understandings of heating and cooling in their interventions?

The objective of the panel is to identify linkages and disjunctures between key sites in the making of the thermal future. These include: locations where the effects of global warming threaten health and wellbeing (e.g. fast-growing cities; intensive agricultural operations); sites where solutions are designed and tested (e.g. academic and industrial engineering; architecture and planning); and the mechanisms by which new technologies are implemented (e.g. building and labor codes; housing policies). Our collaboration aims to extend current engagements with thermal life in anthropology, adjacent social sciences (sociology, geography, science and technology studies, development studies), and beyond. A premise of our approach is that such engagements must begin by framing heating and cooling as culturally situated phenomena, rather than as physiological universals. The framework we plan to develop will connect situated experiences across multiple locations – spanning sites of industrial design, infrastructure planning, and manufacturing – to establish how ideas about thermal comfort, and the capacity of human bodies to live with or withstand volatile environments, are shaping technological solutions to future heating and cooling needs.

Participants:

Jamie Cross, University of Edinburgh

Ashawari Chaudhuri, Cornell University

Ashley Carse, Vanderbilt University

Sarah Besky, Cornell University

Marwa Koheji, NYU-Abu Dhabi

Alex Nading, Cornell University

Ann H. Kelly, King’s College London