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

极端高温已经成为市政当局高度关注的问题，一些城市不仅平均气温更高，而且每年的高温事件和高温天数也更多，这对结构受损的社区产生了不同的影响。这项研究旨在更好地了解气候变化和传染病是如何相互影响的。具体而言，该项目研究了极端高温如何加剧长期covid （SARS-CoV-2的急性后后遗症）的影响，反之亦然，这种新出现的疾病如何加剧极端高温的负担。该项目的资金支持研究这一交叉点的社会、政治和文化影响，并支持研究生学习如何进行社会环境研究。通过使用民族志方法，如调查、访谈、参与者观察和焦点小组，本研究将为理解这些问题的交叉点和复合效应提供框架。研究问题包括：人们的社会生活以何种方式受到热浪和大流行这两个相互交织的危机的影响？人们如何理解和概念化这两个危机的交集？最后，人们如何应对这些挑战（技术、社会景观、互助、居住群体）？通过提供关于这两个相互交叉的危机（气候变化和大流行病）的发展的经验数据，本研究旨在提高对在流行病危机背景下人们的社会和文化世界受到挑战和转变的方式的科学理解。本研究的数据应揭示有关社会形态变化的重要信息，包括家庭构成等现有网络负担的增加，以及新的护理社区的招募（包括在COVID-19第一年形成的互助网络的扩大）。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.