Thermal Thinking: A Symbiocene Lens on an Entangled World

Call for Contributions in the Special Issue of Journal “Tutoring Gedanensis” co-published with LAZNIA CCA Topic: Thermal Thinking: A Symbiocene Lens on an Entangled World. The University of Gdańsk and LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art invite interdisciplinary submissions for a Special Issue on "thermal thinking"— an exploration of heat as a force that shapes environments, bodies, and cultural practices. We aim to bring together perspectives that address the scientific, cultural, and relational dimensions of heat, and explore knowledge practices inspired by the thermal. Working against the visuality bias in the established knowledge practices, this issue will foreground sensory and affective ways of knowing, and explore how thermal conditions and thermocultures shape individual experience, collective practices, and environments.

This Special Issue is organized in the framework of “Studiotopia 2: Enter the Symbiocene with Arts and Science” project, co-organized by LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art and co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. This European initiative aims to promote collaboration between artists and scientists from the field of both the hard sciences and the humanities. The Special Issue will be guest edited by Karolina Sobecka, Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM), HGK Basel, FHNW, the Studiotopia 2 program's invited artist fellow and scientist Anita Lewandowska, academic at University of Gdańsk, member of the program’s advisory committee. The publication is an experiment in co-publishing between University of Gdansk’s journal Tutoring Gedanensis and LAZNIA CCA to foster dialogue between different disciplines and methodologies.

As the global climate rapidly warms, scholars have begun advocating for studies of the thermal in the humanities. “Where is the thermal to be located? Is it a property, a quality, a state of specific objects and bodies? Is it a relation between bodies?” asks sociologist Elena Beregow in an introduction to “Thermal Objects” (2019). Critical geographers Elspeth Opperman and Gordon Walker argue that we should see heat as matter always in-relation (2019). Emerging research includes media theorist Nicole Starosielski’s work on thermo-culture and thermopower (2019, 2021), anthropologist’s Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart’s monograph C-ooling the Tropics (2022), UCLA Heat Lab (1) focusing on thermal inequalities, and Cool Infrastructures (2) research group, which studies exposure and adaptation to heat in urban environments.

As the thermal is emerging as a critical focus, and the embodied experience of heat demands more attention in the climate crisis, we take it up as a topic of explorations in dialogues between different ways of knowing, challenging us to reimagine human place within the planet’s material-energy relationships.

Areas of Interest:

• The Science of Heat: We seek contributions exploring the scientific frameworks around heat, including its historical measurement and conceptualizations, its role in metabolic and ecological processes, and its effects seen in climate disruption. How has our understanding of heat evolved, and how do these perspectives inform our responses to planetary warming? How do scientific methods and instruments predispose us to render the thermal as visual and to ‘see’ only some aspects of the thermal phenomena and processes and how they affect us?
• Cultural Practices of Mediating Temperature: We are interested in how heat is culturally mediated, regulated, and understood. This includes practices in fashion, architecture, or urban planning as designs for thermal comfort (Ong 2012, Chang 2016, Wilson 2021), in food, or agriculture. It also involves the power dynamics around temperature control—"thermopower"—seen in access to heating, cooling, and regulated environments, and how these inequalities affect our lived experiences of climate. How does the negotiation of heat reflect and shape social relations, from everyday encounters to infrastructures that impact communities at larger scales?
• Thermal Thinking and the Symbiocene: Through the lens of thermal thinking, we begin to recognize that all living beings—humans, plants, animals, microbes—are bound in cycles of energy. This theme emphasizes transcorporeality (Alaimo 2018), liveliness (Povinelli 2016, Yusoff 2024), and the entangled agencies of bodies and environments. Can these be foregrounded in the post-natural condition to recognize the emerging symbiotic metabolisms and other formations arising as adaptive responses to living in “capitalist ruins”? Heat is not only a product of individual metabolisms but a medium creating conditions that allow for a shared co-existence, with even the seemingly inert substances playing active roles. Thermal thinking thus reveals Symbiocene (Haraway 2016) as a long-standing condition we’ve always inhabited, marked by thermal exchanges and shared forms of becoming. What new forms of care and co-existence within ecologies transformed by climate change might be revealed in the sensory and affective dimensions of thermal experience?

Dialogical suport

Contributions should be supported by a dialogue with an academic tutor/advisor/dialogue-partner who offers feedback and constructive discussion. This arrangement recasts the traditional ‘academic’ relationship—structured hierarchically—into a dialogical exchange where differences in expertise or ways of knowing are not sources of authority but opportunities for mutual enrichment, supporting the author’s voice while encouraging critical thinking. This recasting is central to Studiotopia’s aim of supporting art-science collaborations.

Contributions:
We encourage short submissions (8-12 pages with figures/tabes etc.) from students, PhD srudents, early-career scholars and scientists, artists, activists, and practitioners across disciplines, produced in dialogue with an academic tutor/advisor/dialogue-partne. Alongside academic essays, we welcome experimental formats including soundscapes, poetry, mappings, photo/ video essays, or forms for participatory practices. We are especially interested in work that reveals how sensorial, affective, and material connections deepen our understanding of thermal ecologies.

The submissions may be in Polish or English.

Submission proposals:

Please submit abstracts by March 10th 2025 via email.

On March 25, we will send information about whether the application has been accepted.

The proposals should include the names and affiliations of the author and tutor, title of the essay, and abstract under 250 words. We invite suggestions for reviewers who are subject experts.

For inquiries, contact rezydencje@laznia.pl.

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External links:

1. www.coolinfrastructures.com/

2. https://heatlab.humspace.ucla.edu/

Source:

1. Alaimo, Stacy. 2018. “Transcorporeality.” In The Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova. https://www.academia.edu/32205792/Alaimo_Trans_corporeality_for_The_Posthuman_Glossary.
2. Beregow, Elena. 2019. “Thermal Objects: Theorizing Temperatures and the Social.” Culture Machine, March 29, 2019. https://culturemachine.net/vol-17-thermal-objects/thermal-objects-theorizing/.
3. Chang, Jiat-Hwee. 2016. “Thermal Comfort and Climatic Design in the Tropics: An Historical Critique.” The Journal of Architecture 21 (8): 1171–1202. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2016.1255907.
4. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/staying-with-the-trouble.
5. Hobart, Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani. 2022. Cooling the Tropics. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/cooling-the-tropics.
6. Ong, Boon Lay. 2012. “Warming up to Heat.” The Senses and Society 7 (1): 5–21. https://doi.org/10.2752/174589312X13173255801969.
7. Oppermann, Elspeth, and Gordon Walker. 2019. “Immersed in Thermal Flows: Heat as Productive of and Produced by Social Practices.” In Social Practices and Dynamic Non-Humans: Nature, Materials and Technologies, edited by Cecily Maller and Yolande Strengers, 129–48. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92189-1_7.
8. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press.
9. Starosielski, Nicole. 2019. “Thermal Violence: Heat Rays, Sweatboxes and the Politics of Exposure.” Culture Machine 17:1–27.
10. ———. 2021. Media Hot and Cold. Duke University Press.
11. Yusoff, Kathryn. 2024. Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.