WHO: Tristan Brown (MIT), Or Porath (Tel Aviv University)
WHAT: The Challenge
In an era of accelerating climate change, environmental crises are not only physical but also cultural. Rising temperatures, extreme weather, and ecological disasters disrupt daily life, but they also unsettle the ways communities make meaning, organize power, and imagine the future. The challenge before us is to understand these crises not merely as scientific or technical problems but as deeply human experiences, lived through the body, embedded in culture, and carried forward in memory and ritual. Without this broader lens, climate justice and adaptation risk remaining incomplete, overlooking the sensory, embodied, and long-term human dimensions of planetary change.
The project responds to this challenge by examining how humans have experienced, represented, and contested heat and cold across time and cultures. Rather than focusing only on temperature data, it explores the sensory weight of thermal extremes in shaping power, divinity, kinship, and social order. Drawing from diverse archives including Siberian exploration narratives and Buddhist hellscapes of fire to the modern realities of urban heat islands and cooling inequities, this project reframes temperature as a cultural and political force. By doing so, it places embodied experience at the center of climate justice debates, helping us see how heat and cold continue to shape global inequalities and ecological futures.
WHY: Motivations & Intentions
Our aim is to bring humanistic inquiry into active dialogue with climate science and sustainability studies by rethinking temperature as a deeply cultural and embodied force. Heat and cold are not simply environmental metrics; they shape how humans feel, think, relate, and govern. Across cultures and histories, thermal experience has served as a medium for imagining divinity, ordering social life, and navigating crisis.
By situating thermal extremes within broader historical and cultural frameworks, Thermal Worlds seeks to:
- Examine embodied experience, affect, and cultural imagination.
- Trace how communities across time and geography have responded to temperature extremes, from sacred fire to polar survival, from monastic discipline to heat inequality.
- Investigate how thermal-related concepts—hellfire, ascetic cold, warmth as intimacy—structure ethical and religious life.
Offer new frameworks for understanding resilience and vulnerability as both material and experiential conditions.
HOW: Methods & Tools
Project Development
Archival and Comparative Research
- Analyze historical accounts of thermal experience, from Arctic expedition journals and medieval Buddhist cosmologies to colonial climatology and urban cooling infrastructures.
- Examine how representations of heat and cold encode power relations, moral hierarchies, and visions of salvation or decay.
Cultural Practices and Sensory Worlds
- Investigate how religious rituals, bodily disciplines, and artistic forms across cultures have mediated thermal experience.
- Explore how communities use sensory tools: chant, sweat, silence, breath and so on, to navigate and regulate their thermal environments.
Collaborative and Interdisciplinary Frameworks
- Build working groups connecting scholars in religion, anthropology, literature, art history, climatology, and environmental justice.
- Partner with digital humanities experts to create a Digital Archive of Thermal Worlds, mapping historical and contemporary experiences of temperature.
Policy and Public Engagement
- Produce public-facing essays and policy briefs that foreground the cultural dimensions of climate response.
- Collaborate with sustainability practitioners to ensure that climate adaptation strategies attend to embodied and cultural needs—not just technological fixes.
HOW CAN I JOIN? Activities & Events in 2026
- February 2026 – Inaugural GHI Forum on Environment, Sustainability & Planetary Stewardship
A cross-disciplinary event exploring how cultural histories of heat and cold can reframe global conversations on resilience, justice, and sustainability. - Spring 2026 – Virtual Working Group: Thermal Worlds
A collaborative seminar series bringing together scholars and practitioners to examine temperature as a lived, imagined, and politicized experience. - Ongoing – Digital Archive of Thermal Worlds
A platform to collect, visualize, and compare historical and contemporary records of thermal extremes, including ritual manuals, cartographies, literature, oral histories, and more.
For further details or to get involved, please contact the project leaders.