Mechanical cooling has become a constitutive feature of many places and domains since the nineteenth century. Fish and tropical fruit, vaccines and data, homes and vehicles, and even entire cities increasingly depend upon continuous processes of artificial cooling. Yet, despite their ubiquity, cooling technologies often remain curiously unnoticed: a background condition of contemporary life that becomes perceptible primarily when it fails.<\/p>\n
Particularly in the United States, the complex system of cold chains, cold storage facilities, and air-conditioned spaces \u2014 in short, the cryosphere \u2014 has become nothing less than a critical infrastructure. In my talk, I explore New Orleans as a particular \u201chub of the cryosphere\u201d. Drawing on observations from an exploratory field visit conducted earlier this year, I trace a series of encounters with the city\u2019s cryosphere in its diverse manifestations, ranging from sno-balls and frostbitten ice-cream aisles to the uneven thermal atmospheres of the air-conditioned interiors of homes, shops, and public buildings.<\/p>\n
\u201cGetting a sense\u201d thereby refers not merely to the initial tentative foray into the field of a habilitation project in its early stages; it is also mobilised as a specific research strategy. How do manifestations of artificial cooling in New Orleans look, smell, feel, and sound? In seeking both to make sense of and to sense the cryosphere in New Orleans, the presentation methodologically argues for an ethnographic research strategy that is attentive to sensory ethnography and informed by maintenance and repair studies. From this perspective, cooling is understood not as a stable technological condition, but as an ongoing accomplishment requiring constant adjustment, maintenance, and repair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","event_category":[45],"class_list":["post-19451","veranstaltung","type-veranstaltung","status-publish","hentry","event_category-colloquium"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/veranstaltung\/19451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/veranstaltung"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/veranstaltung"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"event_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event_category?post=19451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}