Tracing the ruptures and rhythms of summer heat, energy vulnerability and home

Abstract

This paper traces the rhythms and ruptures of summer heat-at-home, revealing unexplored spatiotemporal dimensions of energy and heat vulnerability in the context of climate change. The paper draws on relational and embodied ideas about heat, home, and time. It applies rhythmanalysis and assemblage thinking to empirical research with households across Victoria, Australia, to reveal social practices of coping with, adapting to, and enduring summer heat events. Shared rhythmic responses characterised household experiences of summer heat at home. However, experiences were uneven, as heat-vulnerable households endured heat through dysrhythmic patterns, with relief an uncertain or unachievable outcome. In this way, heat-at-home was characterised by a temporal dissonance, where the longer-term implications of heat responses for health and wellbeing were bracketed out of lived experience. The findings suggest the need for governance of summer heat adaptation, particularly as it intersects with household thermal quality and wider social, material, and economic infrastructures, to pay greater attention to the temporal relations of heat-at-home. In particular, it stresses the significance not only of rhythms of heat and household responses, but also of anthropocentric and static temporal narratives of heat and sociomaterial infrastructures, that left unattended risk suspending more heat-vulnerable households in maladaptive situations.