[ecrea] CfP Thermal Objects (Culture Machine)

CALL FOR PAPERS
Thermal Objects – Theorizing Temperatures and the Social, Special issue 
of Culture Machine, Vol.17 (2018)
Edited by Elena Beregow (University of Hamburg, Germany) 
http://www.culturemachine.net <http://www.culturemachine.net/>

This special issue of Culture Machine, a peer reviewed and open access 
journal, will address thermal processes, bodies and media from 
interdisciplinary and international perspectives. When heat and cold 
appear in the humanities and social sciences, they are often treated 
exclusively as metaphors—think of Ferdinand Tönnies’s description of 
the modern, urbanized society as a cooling process that freezes the 
warm, authentic community; or Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between hot 
and cold media. While thermal metaphors turn out to be useful—perhaps 
even constitutive—tools that make abstract notions imaginable and 
tangible, recent discussions on the materiality of the social offer a 
productive background for new theorizations of temperatures that exceed 
their metaphorical valences.

This special issue aims to rethink the relation of metaphor and 
materiality: How can we theoretically account for thermal mechanisms as 
balance, transfer or collapse? What does it mean to perform hot or cool 
critical theoretical interventions? These and other questions will be 
investigated across three temperature-related dimensions: the senses, 
thermic media and thermopolitics.

Sensory studies has addressed experiences that are not explicitly listed 
in the classical five senses, such as the sense of motion and the sense 
of temperature. But is thermoception only an additional field for 
sensory studies, or does it also inflect our understanding of the 
social? In contrast to the sense of sight, which separates the seeing 
body from the object world, the thermal sense challenges the 
subject/object divide. When we move away from the human body, the 
question of thermoception gets even more complicated, since there is no 
subjective position from which temperature could be sensed. How can we 
theoretically think more-than-human thermal objects and elements? When 
we grasp thermal phenomena as media, their material characteristics and 
properties become visible; for instance, their rhythms and movements, 
and their capacity to store, transfer, and conduct, but also their 
relatively short half-life.

The biological notion of homeostasis, which is crucial to cybernetic 
thought, turns us towards important questions related to the 
measurement, control, and regulation of temperature, which not only 
takes place on the level of internal organization, but on a broader 
political scale (think of new thermal technologies of sensory control, 
as well as thermally organized biopolitics). While the special issue 
aims to focus attention on the importance of temperature and thermal 
objects to questions of climatic change, it also seeks to foreground the 
intrinsic thermic qualities of the social that have led to global 
warming’s proliferation.

Contributions are invited though not limited to the following topics:

Tempered senses

- Thermoception and the anthropology/sociology of the senses
- Skin-topologies and thermal bodies: the (dis)organization of vital energy

- Architectural thermic spaces and tempered atmospheres
- Thermal pleasure and delight

Thermic media

- Hot and Cool in media theory
- Temperature problems of media infrastructures (e.g. heat as 
computing-power and engineering problem)
- Data storage and freezing information

Thermopolitics

- Figures of thermal control in utopian and dystopian fiction
- History of the sciences: historical discourses of temperature, 
thermodynamics and cybernetics

- New thermal technologies: sensors, surveillance and control
- Thermal practices of resistance

Please submit your contributions to Elena Beregow 
((elena.beregow /at/ wiso.uni-hamburg.de) 
<mailto:(elena.beregow /at/ wiso.uni-hamburg.de)>)

The deadline for submission of articles of 4000-6000 words is 19th 
January 2018. If you wish to discuss potential contributions ahead of 
submitting completed articles, please feel free to contact the editor.

Please consult Culture Machine's Guidelines for Authors: 
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/about/submissions#authorGuideline 
<http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/about/submissions#authorGuideline> 


---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please
use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------