Immersed in Thermal Flows: Heat as Productive of and Produced by Social Practices

Abstract

All social practices draw on and intervene in thermodynamic flows: hastening, retarding, redirecting, collecting, converting, or producing thermal energy. Excesses and deficits of heat help render these background flows sensorially conspicuous and materially compelling. We consider how to conceptualise heat in theories of social practice, arguing that rather than seeing heat as ‘an’ element of practice, it is better understood as a dynamic energy within which all practices are immersed. Heat then emerges as inherently both productive of and produced by practices, a conceptualisation which adds energetic-material relations to the array of ‘non-humans’ to be integrated into social practice theory. We explore such thermal flows through the social practices of outdoor manual workers in northern Australia’s tropical monsoon zone.