Tuning into HEAT: Thermoceptive enskilment and insecurity

Abstract

In this article, I address how discernments of alterity as insecurity are intimately connected to bodily perceptions and cultural elaborations of heat. Focusing on the interplay of temperature and danger, I look at the role of thermoception—as sensation, as ambient quality, as idiom, and as technology—in experiences and retellings of (in)security. These are themes I explore in relation to and beyond Hostile Environment Awareness Training (HEAT), an intensive practical course that prepares expats, journalists, NGO workers, and other professionals for their travels to areas deemed unsafe. In the course, participants are taught to tap into their embodied sensations and to acquire the sensory skills to identify, avoid, and mitigate danger. Using hotness as gateway into the relation between sensory enskilment and security, this article contributes to literature concerned with the somatechnics of difference: the learnt corporeal, atmospheric, and immaterial forces that structure how we articulate Otherness and/as danger. In so doing, it unpacks how the senses, and thermoception more specifically, contribute to the production and governance of landscapes of insecurity.