19/12/2025
We are excited to announce our upcoming talk with contributors of Hybrid, Vol 07: Hot, moderated by Shahana Rajani.
Join us on Monday 22nd Dec, 7PM - 8:30PM on Zoom by scanning the QR code.
This volume asks what it means to be 'hot' amid planetary and political crisis, tracing heat as environmental, emotional, political force, shaping power, precarity, resistance, inequality and infrastructural neglect.
Seher Naveed, Editor, Hybrid 07
Ali Mehdi Zaidi examines a roadside perfume stall in Karachi to show how scent becomes a tool for survival amid engineered urban heat, revealing how systems of privilege insulate some bodies while exposing others to precarity.
Nazgol Ansarinia reflects on Tehran’s disappearing water bodies to explore heat as absence, tracing cultural loss through dried rivers, empty pools, and fading architectural and social rituals.
Aslam Kakar analyzes political anger within the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, reframing dissent not as irrational rage but as a legitimate response to state violence and systematic marginalisation.
Shanzeh Afzal documents how extreme heat functions as slow violence in Lyari and Korangi, where infrastructural neglect and urban exclusion turn everyday life into a prolonged struggle for survival.
Marvi Mazhar critiques Karachi’s expanding cooling infrastructures, showing how air-conditioning cools private interiors while intensifying urban heat, ecological damage, and harm to non-human life.
