Heat Talk by Nick Rahier: Thermal Futuring Beyond Degrees of Heat

How do people sense, interpret, and anticipate life in a warming world? While climate science models heat through temperature thresholds and probabilistic forecasts, these metrics often flatten lived experience into numerical abstractions. They obscure the sociocultural, affective, and existential labour through which people make hotter futures imaginable and livable. Drawing on ethnographic research in East Africa’s Rift Valley, this talk shows how anthropology can contribute to foresight studies by tracing how heat is lived, felt, narrated, and negotiated—revealing futures as relational, contested, and continuously made in the present.