About this Event
“From Absence to Ab-sense: Speculations from the Air-conditioned States and Societies of Asia” is a free public lecture and keynote presentation SAHANZ/AUHPH Conference: Absence
This presentation takes the conference theme of absence as its point of departure but proposes a conceptual displacement: from absence to ab-sense. If absence names invisibility within a scopic regime, ab-sense displaces that ocularcentrism to name a different order of imperceptibility—that of feeling rather than seeing. It belongs to a thermal regime, in which power is enacted through the manipulation of temperature and the patterning of sensitivities to heat.
Drawing on a larger book project that explores the thermal histories and politics of the built environment in Singapore and Doha, Jiat-Hwee argues that the provision of thermal comfort through mechanical cooling and environmental encapsulation recalibrates our bodily perception and desensitizes us to the temporal and spatial fluctuations of exterior temperature by creating a thermal steady-state across time and a thermal equilibrium across space. This bodily attunement, which produces an ab-sense by suppressing our perception of the socio-environmental externalities and inequities of our chilled, comfortable lives on a heating planet, is central to thermal governance and citizenship in these two cities. I posit that thinking and feeling thermally from these two sites challenges the global diffusionist histories of air conditioning and the built environment told through narratives of thermal capitalism.
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Jiat-Hwee Chang is Dean’s Chair Associate Professor of Architecture and Research Leader of Science, Technology and Society cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of architecture, environment, and STS. He is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture (2016, awarded International Planning History Society’s Book Prize 2018) and co-author of Everyday Modernism (2023, awarded Society of Architectural Historians Great Britain’s Colvin Prize 2023). He is currently working on a book manuscript on the socio-cultural histories and techno-politics of air-conditioning and the built environment in the Asian Anthropocene.
Associate Professor Jiat-Hwee Chang's public lecture and participation in the 2026 SAHANZ/AUHPH Absence Conference is supported by the at the University of Melbourne.
Event venue & nearby stays
Lecture Theatre 1 (B117), Melbourne School of Design, Masson Road, The University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus, Melbourne, Australia
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