Heat: A Media Ecological Approach to Climate Sensitivities
18. Nov
Talks by Ayesha Omer (York University, Toronto) and John Shiga (Toronto Metropolitan University).
Mediating the Heatwave: Inside Karachi’s Thermal Ecology
Talk by Ayesha Omer
In June 2015, amidst soaring temperatures, severe electricity, and water shortages, hundreds collapsed on the streets in Karachi. Emergency wards, morgues, and graveyards became full. Drawing on environmental media studies, infrastructure studies, and urban studies, the 2015 Karachi heatwave created, what I call, “a thermal ecology” that encapsulates shifting material, geophysical, cultural phenomena that comprise life inside a heatwave. I demonstrate that the thermal ecology reconstitutes mediation, as relationships between media forms, systems, and cultures reorganize in response to ubiquitous heat. I examine three instances of such thermal mediation: first, a media assemblage of citizen-led media activism disseminated through public and corporate media platforms; second, a data computation-driven urban governance plan to tackle future heatwaves; and, third, a community-based visual media art project, Of Struggle, which documents and intervenes against the violent loss of human, nonhuman life from urban development. While recent scholarship attends to the tremendous heat expended by digital media, this paper examines the thermal ecology as it conditions forms of mediation, and the social and ecological lifeworlds within which these are embedded. It argues that the thermal ecology – its media actions, governance, imaginaries – need urgent examination as excessive, violent heat is an ongoing condition and marked future for all.
Dr. Ayesha Omer is an Assistant Professor of digital futures at York University, Canada. In 2025-26, she is a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, USA. Dr. Omer studies the relationships between media technologies, political sovereignty, and the climate crisis. While at the IAS, she is completing her book manuscript, Networks of Dust: Media Technologies and Environments of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which examines dust as the materiality and mediation of infrastructural intervention in indigenous environments, through an ethnography of Chinese digital logistics, energy, and communications infrastructure in Pakistan's borderlands.
Sounding Ocean Heat
Talk by John Shiga
This talk examines the entanglement of sound, heat, and colonial power in the scientific practice of acoustic tomography (AT), a technique developed in the 1970s to measure ocean warming by transmitting sound through the deep sound channel. I will trace how experiments such as the Heard Island Feasibility Test (1991) and the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate project (1996–2006) adapted Cold War ocean surveillance systems for use in climate science, recasting them as tools for measuring and visualizing ocean heat. This "peaceful" use of Cold War military infrastructure extended imperial images of ocean space as "oceanus nullius" (an empty, transparent medium for the projection of power) into technoscientific imaginaries of climate futures, and simultaneously obscured the ocean’s sonic density and legitimated extractive, military, and colonial projects. The talk will highlight the dual processes of transduction (converting ocean heat into acoustic signals and visual inscriptions) and substantialization (rendering heat as a bounded, measurable "thing") as central to the work of thermal media in this context whereby the violent and volatile phenomenon of ocean warming is transformed into a measurable and governable object that yields extractable data and generates value. I end by asking how climate futures might change if we treated ocean heat not as an object but as a relation that exposes us to histories of extraction, violence, and multispecies vulnerability.
John Shiga is a Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University. He also serves as the Director of the Media & Design Innovation PhD program. His research engages with a range of topics including intellectual property, the history of sonic media, environmental media, interspecies communication, ocean sound and Cold War military-science. His current research and creative projects focus on the politics of underwater sound in the context of the Cold War.