Tracing the Labor of Cooling Infrastructures
In the summer of 2024, I attended my first Digital Field Methods Institute (DFMI), hosted by the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. At DFMI, I created the zine “Thermal Witnessing,” documenting my experiences walking and photographing my lived environment in Austin, Texas with a thermal camera. You can view the zine I created at DFMI below.
Since DFMI in 2024, Thermal Witnessing has evolved into a larger project. In 2025, I received a grant from the UT City Co-Lab to expand the project to the greater Austin community.
Working in collaboration with Go Austin / Vamos Austin (GAVA), in this project, I combine methods from community climate science and rhetorical field methods to document lived experience through oral storytelling, photography, and written field notes. Through this work, resident leaders collect thermal images and field notes of their daily environments, documenting how extreme heat affects neighborhoods, families, labor, and health in Austin’s Eastern Crescent.
Photographs and stories from this project are currently being compiled into a public exhibition which will debut in fall 2026 in East Austin. A full report from this project will be available soon.
Madeline Bruegger 