Geographies of Thermopolitical Sacrifice

Abstract

Human geography scholarship understands extreme heat as socially produced and politically mediated. However, dominant notions of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation fail to capture heat-related harm as predictable and institutionally tolerated. This paper conceptualizes geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice to foreground how extreme heat is governed through differential exposure and thresholds of acceptable loss. Extending debates on abandonment, thermal violence, and climate necropolitics, it shifts the analysis from descriptive vulnerability toward the political allocation of harm. It offers a new lexicon and methodologies for sensing sacrifice and weathering and concludes with hopeful thermopolitics as a justice-oriented praxis of redistribution, repair, and care.