In a warming world, the politics and aesthetics of thermal control have become unavoidable. How is heat perceived, mediated, and governed? The symposium Climate Sensitivities: Aesthetics and Politics of Heat approaches heat not as a mere physical fact but as a media-cultural phenomenon: an object of thermal mediation and a politically contested resource. Bringing together perspectives from sound studies, visual studies, and the broader environmental humanities, the symposium asks what becomes perceptible when we attend to thermoception alongside seeing and hearing, from infrared imaging and satellite data to the acoustics of overheating data centres and the uneven distribution of heat in the city. Drawing on Nicole Starosielski’s notion of thermopower, the symposium examines how regimes of temperature management organise bodies and environments, expanding zones of thermal privilege and thermal harm. It tracks how air conditioning has shifted from a luxury to a sociotechnical system on which we increasingly depend and how thresholds of survivability and liveability reframe what counts as a habitable place. From a climate-justice perspective, it asks how thermal comfort might be reimagined as part of the commons rather than a private privilege.

Building on two workshops held at Leuphana University of Lüneburg within the research focus Climate Futures in Digital Cultures, the symposium consolidates an emerging conversation on thermocultures and thermal politics and, for the first time in the German-language academic context, establishes a shared framework for the media-ecological study of heat.

Keynote: Nicole Starosielski

Lectures by Stefan Höhne, Lana Uzarashvili, Laliv Melamed, Daniel Wolter, Su Yu Hsin, Ignacio Farias, Noa Levin, Kent Chan, Amelie Buchinger, Kathrin Köppert, Florian Sprenger, Benjamin Sprick & Katharina Alsen, Paul Heinicker & Merle Ibach & Patrick Salz