Heat traps: enclosure, rhythm, and nocturnal care under extreme heat in Rio de Janeiro

Extreme heat is not only a matter of temperature: it forces a reconfiguration of the geography of day and night that reshapes when, where, and under what conditions care can take place. Research has established heat as a health risk, but less is known about the spatial and temporal labour through which carers manage it. Drawing on ethnographic accounts and co-produced heat diaries from mothers and carers of children in Rio de Janeiro, this paper examines how extreme heat disrupts daily rhythms, contracts accessible space, and intensifies embodied caregiving labour. It argues that extreme heat produces a confinement of care that is at once spatial, rhythmic, and nocturnal. First, daytime heat encloses carers and children indoors, but into “heat traps”: domestic and institutional interiors that fail to function as thermal refuge, an inversion of the comfortable, air-conditioned interiorisation theorised in the Global North enclosure literature. Second, this enclosure forces a cumulative, often dysrhythmic reorganisation of care across the twenty-four-hour cycle, intensifying daytime labour while postponing other caring practices into cooler hours. Third, public and domestic life migrates into the night, which becomes the only liveable timespace, care postponed and intensified rather than freely rescheduled. Children’s play and mobility are deferred, while cooling, settling, and vigilance continue after dark. These disruptions generate exhaustion and dependence on energy and infrastructure, distributed unevenly by gender, class, and caregiving responsibility. The paper reframes extreme heat as a crisis of social reproduction, and everyday life as a central site of climate vulnerability and adaptation.