Video: Phillip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart 'Off the Grid in Ontario'

To accompany the Body & Society article ‘Making Sense of Domestic Warmth: Affect, Involvement, and Thermoception in Off-grid Homes’, Phillip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart provided us with a short film about their larger research project.

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in Alberta, as well as across multiple sites in Canada, this article describes and discusses the practices and experiences of heating off the grid with renewable resources (i.e. passive solar and wood). Heating with renewable resources is herein examined in order to apprehend the cultural significance of dynamics of corporeal involvement in the process of creating indoor warmth. A distinction between energy for which corporeal involvement is relatively high (hot energy) and relatively low (cool energy) is then made. Off-grid indoor warmth is therefore understood as a hot energy requiring intense involvement. The authors argue that thermoception is a type of affect with catalytic properties.