Sketch+8+(LMB)+Papers+and+Panel

The multi-layered scales that constitute urban life are mirrored in the infrastructures and structures of control that run through the material, cultural and social fabrics of the cityscapes we inhabit. This panel brings together different cases of governing and ordering the city, its human and non-humans inhabitants, and its materialities. Specifically it asks for who/what is recognized to governed, under what circumstances, in what context, on what scales, and to what ends, and how?
 * * **Cities of Ignorance: Systems of Control in the Invisible City**

Particular emphasis is placed on the visibilities and invisibilities that are produced in different modes of governing the city, but also constitute and allow for certain regimes of governing, and not others. Contributions should pay attention to the sliding ignorances that are embedded in social-material-cultural (etc.) arrangements of governance: By, on the one hand, shaping what is to be governed, and what governance is ignorant of its practical, structural, and systematic exercise; and on the other hand, by producing and building ignorance as a means for governing, control and power. || __My Abstract:__

This talk explores three approaches for governing urban heat. Moving forth and back between Bangalore (India), Vienna (Austria) and New York City (USA), I pay attention how heat is distributed, dealt with and counteracted across scales. Taking the audience on a journey between the cities, we meet the different inhabitants of the cities, their material make up, and the structures and infrastructures that both distribute heat and the means for relief and counteracting. I show how heat and its problematization, must be seen culturally, politically, socially, materially and technologically embedded. By attending to the different ways heat is problematized – and especially how it is rendered unproblematic, invisible and a non-issue for different entities and across scales – different means for governing heat, and governing through heat emerge – with far reaching consequences for the unequal and often oppressive distribution of heat stressors. What emerges is a new perspective on "the city" and urban life //in heat.// Tracing heat throughout urban life becomes a means following a phenomena that is often rendered invisible and ignored. Making heat visible where we are ignorant of it can become a means for re-tracing larger systematic oppression inherently build into different governing systems. But it can also bring forward different strategies and methods for counteracting the oppressive effects of this ignorance. || Islands are both: bounded and on the boundaries. They are playgrounds and testing sites, for life unfolds on the margins in different ways. Islands have always also been places where things are often hard to come by and sustaining life on a rock in the middle of the ocean needs management of scarcity. Islands need ports, trading zones that allows boundary crossings: Ports are entry points into margins. Not only to bring things in, but also to get them out, one has to travel the margins, the spaces in-between. Time and durability matter differently on islands, and so does the space between spaces that needs crossing. Leaving and coming are both procedural: processes of traversing these spaces in-between: Islands are obsessed with their margins and boundaries, as they are themselves boundaries and boundedness.
 * Heated Governance**
 * * **Between the Islands: Deep seas and narrow margins**

Where Sengers, Watts, Williams, Liboiron, and Holmer explored islands at the (cutting) edge, this panel picks up the conversation by turning to the spaces that span between the islands: expansive scapes of water, sand, concrete and woods, or seemingly linear divisions of mapped boundaries, time zones, doors and walls of institutions' concrete buildings – all of them worlds of their own. Exploring boundaries becomes in this panel an exploration of methodological and conceptual means available in STS and beyond, to understand how we come to understand space, boundedness, and their unsettling, as well as the implications of our own conceptual, theoretical, and methodological choices.

The format of this panel seeks to erode and rebuild boundaries: Between the panelists and the theorists they draw upon, between the panelists and the audience, and between those in the room and those absent. The form of the panel is narrative intervention and performance by the means of story telling. Stories allow the shifting between partial perspectives. Stories do not seek symmetry, but the inversion – a means that was fruitful for others as well: feminist epistemology (inversion from the center to the margin) or studies of ignorance (from what we know to what we do not know) are but two examples. asdfkalsdfjlkasdjflkasdjflkasdjflaksdjflaksdjfalskdjfalskdfjasldkfjaslkdfjasdljf Heat, as unbounded and ambivalent as it is, becomes materialized: Urban heat islands are heat made concrete, as they are made of concrete, in the double meaning of the word. Heat gets also momentum: It rolls over us, in form of waves. And heat is superimposed over us: Heat domes lock us in. And yet it is the ambivalence of heat that makes it so interesting to chart its territories and to chart their boundaries: as the islanders spend more time mapping the seas that need to be traversed, than they spend for mapping the spaces they inhabit, this talk seeks the charting of the uncharted margins and boundaries of heat. What unfolds are stories about containing heat, distributing heat, and fending off heat – and the different spaces that are created in doing so. Where is heat fended off to? Who is protected from heat, and how? And who is not? Shifting perspectives reveal the different locations and non-locations of heat and the life on and in the margins that emerges. These narrates the stories of those who try to sustain their life on the margins of overheated cities and the protected zones that are created within them: Who can escape, who has to stay? Getting out and in, crossing the many boundaries and borders of heat, become political acts, in this talk. || This curated panel assembles stories and cases that foreground how we sense the un-cared for and the under-articulated. Under negotiation are how the means for sensing the worlds we inhabit help articulating them, and how simultaneously these worlds shape our senses and their use. Invited are contributions that bring forward cases where "our" senses play a major into articulating and enacting //new// worlds, worlds that are unthinkable in dominating knowledge regimes. The stories told in this panel are about moments where we sense that something is wrong, unjust, oppressive, ignorant. In how far can our senses help articulate counter-narrative, new worlds, alternatives?
 * Tags:** Boundaries, Margins, Marginalization, Systems of/Governing of&through, || __My Abstract:__
 * Cities: Islands in the Sun**
 * * **Sensing the Un-Cared and Under-Articulated**

Under consideration are the senses, those who sense, the knowledges that are produced and counteracted in sensing and through our senses, as well as the worlds that are at play. We consider how we sense colliding worlds.

At stake are:
 * A wide array of senses and sensing-mechanisms: from our own bodies', to our sensing machines in science and in our technologies, to the ways institution sense, account and control.
 * A wide array, thus also, of entities who sesnse – humans, nonhumans (from animals to microbes to chemicals and beyond), institutions (science, polity, corporations), machines (robots or smart homes, for example) and other material, cultural or social entities (smart cities, satellites).

The panel seeks to foreground how, in sensing, we create worlds: by producing knowledge, but also by relying on the thought styles that guide what we sense, how, and where. And how this is done against orders of institutionally organized and dominating means and modes of sensing. || __My Abstract:__


 * Sensing Heat: Two acts of sensing**

Heat seems easy to sense: We sweat, thus it is hot. Yet, heat remains deadly. Across the globe disastrous heat waves become more frequent, affecting young and the elderly, mentally ill, drug users, and homeless the most. The most vulnerable live on the margins of our society. Simultaneously they often have a reduced sensibility towards their own bodies – making visible how indirectly and embodied or sensing for heat is. What makes sensing heat even more difficult is that we cannot simply measure it: temperature alone is no clear indicated for what is affected how: be it our bodies, melting structures and infrastructures, the withering of our fields and woods, or the scarcity of water for animals, to mention but a few.
 * Act 1: World making**

Heat, rather, is a dynamic phenomena that is highly context-dependent: on topography, humidity and other climate conditions, geography, material conditions (urban heat islands), sediments, but also social and cultural conditions, organization and orders.

It becomes important to ask: how we measure heat, and how; how we make sense of our measures of heat, and how we make heat sensible through connecting the measurements with the effects the allow to predict or infer. As through the ways heat is sensed we build a relationship to it, allow for responses and its appropriation. Heat often complex bodily, social, epistemological, political and technological mechanisms to become visible and sensible in specific ways.

We build worlds in sensing heat.

And simultaneously, often becomes sensible when worlds collide. When the trees in Bangalore are lost, heat becomes inescapable. "We've never seen van in my childhood", [|one says], ".. now not only fans, you have to by the A/C also."
 * Act 2: World-imagining**

The trees are making place for broadband cables and more efficient and capable electric grids and broader roads to power Bangalore's transformation into India's next tech valley. One can sense the transformation in the hot air. And this sense brings people to take action, as civic coalitions form to preserve trees and fight the newest governmental innovation project. It is an act of resistance, not only against heat, and not only for trees: it creates a sense India's colonial history, globalization and capitalism; and it gives sense to re-imagining Indias futures and histories newly. ||