The Temperature Complex: Epistemic Media and the Governance of Perception

This dissertation analyzes how media make sense of heat. Typically, temperature is either treated as an entirely natural phenomenon or an inescapably subjective one. Instead, I show how media entangle bodies, images, and infrastructures into "temperature complexes" that coordinate collective experiences of heat. Thermometers, thermal imaging systems, television broadcasts, mobile weather apps, forensic investigations, documentary films, and climate models all actively arrange how people sense and manage temperature. This dissertation tracks how such epistemic media acculturate diverse populations to common senses of thermal reality. Thermal justice is becoming an increasingly urgent issue. The Temperature Complex approaches global heating at an oblique angle, as an epochal concern that escalates the political stakes of thermoception more broadly. I develop conceptual tools to diagnose and analyze thermal inequality, as well as proposals to challenge it. Thus far, media scholars concerned with temperature have tended to focus on representations of it or on its material impacts. I develop a method that integrates both approaches by demonstrating that when media distribute thermal perception through images, they simultaneously distribute thermal risk through infrastructures. Media stabilize these distributive regimes into complexes that regulate social reality. Across five chapters, I show how five complexes schematize heat at contingent scales. Each chapter explores how a perceptual schema gives experiential form to a nebulous risk, configuring thermal relations and power relations in the process. Chapter 1 argues that thermographic fever screenings visualized COVID according to a sense of security that bolstered existing regimes of control. Chapter 2 identifies an ideal of relatability that glossed over social and environmental difference in local television coverage of a deadly heat wave. In Chapter 3, I consider how digital weather apps' modes of personalization privatize experiences of extreme heat. Chapter 4 then turns to communities on the front lines of global heating and shows that the law's aesthetic criteria disqualify these plaintiffs from accessing redress. Chapter 5 contrasts advocate media's tendency toward victimology from the quotidian practices of weathering through which people witness and endure thermal violence. Finally, the coda compares several approaches to modeling thermal repair and counterposes economized methods of making whole to democratic projects of building capacity. As the argument builds across these broadening scales, I highlight their mutual imbrications to claim that thermal justice must be approached as an intersectional issue that encompasses them all.