Heat and Inequality

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). Coping with life-threatening heat is a shared daily experience by many around the globe. However, socioeconomic inequality makes the experience of climate change uneven, particularly in relation to excessive heat.

This ethnographic research project will explore how heat is connected to social inequality in a comparative case study in two diverse cases. The research team, composed of social scientists working in collaboration with undergraduate students from San Diego State University’s Imperial Valley campus (SDSU-IV), will ask how, in both of these settings, differential exposure to high temperatures and access to technologies to cool down develop along diverse demographic lines.

In addition, the project allows students from SDSU-IV to gain valuable methodological training and international research experience while also taking seriously a problem that affects their families and communities, showing them how scientific research offers potential solutions not only to individual experiences with inequality but also to ingrained problems of structural differences.

This comparative project addresses the broader societal goals of addressing human strategies for dealing with extreme heat as well as improving our understanding of the mechanisms that lead to climate-related injustice. A critical motivation of our ethnographic study is to explore how daily struggles to stay cool/weather the heat offer insight into deeply embedded societal beliefs which uphold inequality and that create barriers to change.

Documenting the way in which inequality is related to exposure to heat is the first step towards achieving equity for people in the wake of heat-related environmental change.

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.