Scale and Modularity in Thermal Governance: The Replication of India’s Heat Action Plans

Since 2013, when the first urban Heat Action Plan (HAP) in India was developed in and for the western city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, there are now more than 30 HAPs focused on different cities, regions, and entire states in the country, many following the original template developed in Ahmedabad. This essay inquires into the temporal and spatial politics of such heat action planning, asking: what is the nature of thermal governance that HAPs posit? Based on our analysis, we suggest that two key attributes characterize Indian HAPs: first, they enframe heat waves as disasters; second, as the Ahmedabad template has travelled to other locations, HAPs have ceased to engage with their local contexts in any meaningful way. We further argue that such a conceptualization of HAPs has produced important obfuscations, shaping official knowledge about and responses to extreme heat in ways that are unable to grapple with the messy, uneven, and contested nature of the socio-political terrains in which they are supposed to intervene

Burnout: An Ethnographic Study of Occupational Stress among Mid-Career IT Professionals in Hyderabad, India

This dissertation focuses on the production of burnout among mid-career IT professionals in the city of Hyderabad, India. My analysis is oriented by two main questions: What is said to produce to burnout among IT workers? Why do IT workers continue to work under conditions that they experience as being extremely stressful? Drawing on in-depth ethnographic interviews with IT workers in Hyderabad, participant observation, and analysis of primary and secondary literature, I argue that burnout among IT workers is produced at the intersection of significant political-economic and cultural shifts. These include, for example, the altered nature of work in the new economy, the blurring between personal and professional space/time, and the cultural privileging of IT-based employment that effectively locks individuals into IT work with seemingly no other options. Employment in the Information Technology (IT) industry has come to symbolize the promise of securing middle-class status and associated livelihoods in post-liberalization India. As a significant body of scholarship demonstrates, this promise has resulted in deep cultural, educational, institutional, and political-economic reorientations in order to facilitate the growth of the IT industry in India. These reorientations, however, have also produced an experience of high stress -- often referred to as burnout in popular discourse -- among some IT professionals. While the making of the new Indian middle class in relation to IT-based work has been investigated at length in scholarly literature, the associated production of occupational stress, i.e. burnout, has received scant attention. My research aims to address this gap. Overall, it contributes to furthering empirical and theoretical understandings of IT-based work in India under contemporary conditions of globalisation

Moving Ethnography: Infrastructuring Doubletakes and Switchbacks in Experimental Collaborative Methods

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on the development of The Asthma Files, a collaborative ethnography project to understand the cultural dimensions of environmental health, and on the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, digital infrastructure first built to support The Asthma Files but now available as a community resource for archiving, analyzing, and publishing ethnographic data and writing. A key finding is that different traditions and practices of ethnography require different infrastructures. © 2021 Finnish Society for Science and Technology Studies. All rights reserved

City Profile: Hyderabad

The report documents the urban transformation of Hyderabad, from its founding in the sixteenth century to its present day positioning as a global centre, especially for Information Technology (IT)- and Life Sciences-based industries. Locating the city’s contemporary experience of climate in this history is important. While the city has been a key cultural and economic centre since its founding, its transformation into a global centre has dramatically altered the city’s spatial and demographic characteristics, and the texture of its built environment. Such transformations have profound implications for how heat is experienced and responded to in the city

Extreme Heat and COVID-19: The Impact on the Urban Poor in Asia and Africa

The research on which this report was based was funded by the UK Research and Innovation and the Global Challenges Research Fund through the Economic and Social Research Council (Award ES/T008091/1) and by the Scottish Funding Council as part of Cool Infrastructures, a multi-disciplinary project into life with heat in global cities. We also thank the Norwegian Red Cross and Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for publication support.The study provides substantial new data on the direct as well as indirect impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, thermal comfort and heat-related illness, in Jakarta (Indonesia), Hyderabad (India), Karachi and Hyderabad (Pakistan) and Douala (Cameroon). These cities are home to very large or rapidly growing low-income populations dealing with extreme heat. Alongside data on heat exposure and symptoms associated with heat-related illness, the report supplies supplementary data points on access to electricity, water, food, health services, as well as income and food intake during the COVID-19 pandemic, that will be of use to policy makers and researchers. The report is intended for use by governmental and non-governmental organisations in these cities and countries as they work to fine-tune policy and programme responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and avoid heat-related health impacts. Its broader findings are intended to be of use to inform interventions in urban areas facing similar challenges across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and South East Asia

Towards a climate-health approach in Indian healthcare: Perspectives of specialist doctors on health impacts of extreme heat in Hyderabad

Introduction: Climate change impacts human health by exacerbating existing vulnerabilities to communicable and non-communicable diseases and creating new ones. Consequently, there has been increasing recognition of the need for a dedicated focus on ‘climate health’ in medical education and the healthcare profession globally. In this study, we explored the perspectives of doctors on the impact of heat on human health in Hyderabad, India and how a climate health approach can be adopted across Indian healthcare. Methods: A global literature review on climate health broadly, and heat health specifically was carried out. Based on our analysis of the literature, we developed an interview questionnaire and conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 specialist physicians in order to understand their perspectives on the impacts of heat on human health in the region of Hyderabad and institutional transformations necessary to better address questions of heat health. Interview findings were interpreted against extant research on climate health. Results: Climate health and heat-health challenges are aggravating globally, and the doctors perceive that the Hyderabad region is no exception. While efforts are underway to operationalize a climate health approach in healthcare systems in countries of the Global North, such an orientation is almost absent from the context of Indian medical education and healthcare. Conclusion: Impacts of climate change and heat on human health are becoming more apparent in the Hyderabad region. This suggests a strong need to incorporate greater attention to climate health and heat health as part of medical education and the healthcare system in India. Funding: This research has been conducted as part of the “Cool Infrastructures: Life with Heat in the Offgrid City” project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK (Award No: ES/T008091/1)

Moving Ethnography: Infrastructuring Doubletakes and Switchbacks in Experimental Collaborative Methods

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on the development of The Asthma Files, a collaborative ethnography project to understand the cultural dimensions of environmental health, and on the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, digital infrastructure first built to support The Asthma Files but now available as a community resource for archiving, analyzing, and publishing ethnographic data and writing. A key finding is that different traditions and practices of ethnography require different infrastructures