Dr. Nick Rahier is a Postdoctoral Research Associate affiliated to the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven and CARAM (Centre for Anthropological Research on Affect and Materiality) at Ghent Univeristy. Nick first studied African Studies at Ghent University and then pursued a PhD in Anthropology at KU Leuven. He has experience as a program coordinator at the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology , KU Leuven, is coordinating a research consortium on Chronic Respiratory Disease in Africa (RESPIRA), leading a research project on eco-pesticide production in Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda and is PI of a project on AI and citizen science for air quality monitoring in Nakuru, Kenya funded by the Flemisch International Climate Action Programme (FICAP).
His forthcoming monograph with University College London Press (UCLPress), "City-Heat: Sensing Viable Futures in Nakuru, Kenya", reframes heat as a socio-cultural and sensory analytic rather than a technical indicator of climate change. In Anthropocene debates, ‘heat’ has become a central metaphor through which politics, philosophy, and science articulate the urgency of planetary crisis. In many such contexts, heat is converted into temperature data, such as thermal thresholds, ecological tipping points, and algorithmic projections concerning the planet’s future viability. Yet, reducing heat to temperature metrics flattens the complexity of lived experience and erases the messy, affective, and uneven ways in which people inhabit, interpret, and respond to widespread changes that are creating crises on multiple fronts, defined as the “polycrisis.” In City-Heat, Nick breaks with temperature-based understandings of heat and delves into a richer, more emic exploration of its socio-cultural and sensory dimensions. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Nakuru, Kenya, he examines how his interlocutors sustain viable life under what they perceive as hotter conditions—socially, existentially, and relationally—and how they forge pathways into the future to sustain the very possibility of “cooler” horizons.
He published parts of his research as articles or scientific outreach in journals/media/blogs such as, among others, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Cultural Anthropology, City, and Development Economics. More articles are currently under review and Nick is working towards publishing his first book-lenght monograph with UCLPress. Nick is mostly interested in anthropological research on the intersection of technology, environmentalism, the urban, the post-human and health.
