blogs

How do we know about the extreme heat? Writers, scholars, and artists come together to tackle this question in this interdisciplinary zine across eight chapters, led by Brian O’Neill and Anne-Lise Boyer. Issue 2 of Heat Diary – “Practices” focuses on ambient vulnerabilities in both urban and rural contexts in the USA, the UK, and France by mobilizing the insights of social science, forensic architecture, cultural criticism, and aesthetic analysis.

This paper, published in Big Data and Society, draws on critical social science theories including decoloniality, intersectionality, radical transdisciplinarity, and reflexivity, to explores the limitations of conventional data science methods and pedagogy, advocating instead for a critical paradigm shift aimed at reclaiming data science for just geographies. We highlight the necessity for an approach that recognises data science as inherently subjective, deeply embedded in social and political contexts, and fundamentally shaped by historical legacies of colonialism and exclusion. 

This review paper, published in Progress in Environmental Geography, examines critical perspectives on heat in geography. As a spatio-temporal phenomena that is at once physical and meteorological, as well as environmental, social, technical, cultural, embodied, and political, geographers have much to contribute towards understanding heat and its differential impacts. We argue that critical (human) geography should foreground heat, and its complex materiality.

This paper, co-authored with Joe Williams (Cardiff University) in Global Environmental Change, introduces the concept of ambient vulnerability. Ambience concerns the overlapping and shifting material forms that constitute a person’s surroundings – including (but not limited to) air quality, flow, temperature, humidity, noise and light – that contribute to their health, wellbeing and (dis)comfort.

This chapter recognises that although many of the most pervasive inequalities are embedded in unequal gender relations, gender has only recently emerged as a focus in conversations about energy justice in the Global North. Co-authored with Neil Simcock and Saska Petrova, the paper sets out a framework for understanding the ways in which energy justice is shaped by gender relations, and vice versa.

This chapter in the Handbook of Spatial Analysis in the Social Sciences explores how spatial analysis techniques can be used to shed light on the distribution of energy poverty in different geographic contexts.

This paper, co-authored with Stefan Bouzarovski (The University of Manchester) and published in Environment and Planning F, explores the socio-technical interconnections between atmospheric systems, and energy systems (from the extraction right through to the consumption of energy resources).