Socio-Cultural Effects of the COVID-19/Extreme Heat Syndemic

Extreme heat has become a heightened issue of municipal concern, with some cities experiencing not only hotter average temperatures but also more high heat events and more days of high temperatures annually producing differential effects in structurally harmed communities. This research aims to provide greater understanding of how climate change and infectious diseases impact one another. Specifically, this project examines how extreme heat compounds the effects of long-covid (post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2), and vice versa, how does this newly emergent disease compound the burdens of extreme heat. The funding for this project supports research that examines the social, political, and cultural effects of this intersection, as well as support for a graduate student to learn how to conduct socio-environmental research. By using ethnographic methods such as surveys, interviews, participant observation, and focus groups, this research will provide frameworks for understanding the intersections and compounding effects of these issues. Research questions include: In what ways are peoples' social lives affected by the intersecting crises of heat and the pandemic? How do people understand and conceptualize the intersection of these two crises? And finally, how are people managing these challenges (technologies, social landscapes, mutual aid, residential groups)? By producing experiential data about the unfolding of these two intersecting crises (climate change and the pandemic), this study aims to improve scientific understanding of the ways that peoples' social and cultural worlds are challenged and transformed in the context of syndemic crises. The data from this study should reveal important information about shifting social formations, including increased burdens on existing networks like family formations, as well as the recruitment of new communities of care (including the expansion of mutual aid networks that formed in the first year of COVID-19). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.