Bound by Ice: the politics of Cooling
This is a growing archive and space for collective inquiry into Cooling and its thermal infrastructures—how they shape labour, ecology, and social life across geographies.
By assembling stories, ideas, field notes, and resources, we aim to repoliticize Cooling and trace the contours of thermal apartheid to inform climate justice and labour struggles.
Why Cooling? (with a capital C)
The labour of Cooling — whether in ice factories, cold storage units, or the maintenance of HVAC systems — is often invisible, performed by precarious workers whose bodies sustain thermal comfort and logistical flows without ever entering dominant narratives of climate or labour struggles.
Tracing the infrastructures of cooling reveals how the preservation of life and profit relies on hidden economies of energy and extraction, making it a potent site to rethink entangled social and ecological futures.
'C'ooling in caps represents our attempt to politicise thermal infrastructures.
