Catherine Trundle

15 Years of Austerity Eroded Public Infrastructure—Now Extreme Heat Is Exposing the Cost - Global Development Institute Blog By Dr Gemma Sou and Ms Clare Steele. We’re told ever-hotter summers are inevitable. What’s less discussed is that Britain’s ability to cope has been systematically dismantled — not by the climate itse...

Austerity cuts in the UK have persistently hollowed out the everyday infrastructures that can protect people from heat stress, including cuts to the maintenance budgets of parks and the closures of libraries and swimming pools.

Qualitative researchers are increasingly utilising reflexive practices to ensure transparency and assure quality. Current researcher reflexivity, we show, often hinges upon a set of assumptions about reflexivity itself. Through a critical literature review combined with reflexive vignettes, we offer an epistemological critique of reflexivity. We advocate for robust reflexivity, a practice that critically reflects on reflexivity itself. We thus encourage qualitative researchers to critique their reflexive practices in four ways: (1) we challenge the idea that reflexivity leads to revelation, and show the ways this idea reintroduces positivist notions of Truth under a constructionist guise; (2) we challenge simple binaries within many positionality statements, nuancing ideas of insider and outsider status, affinity and difference, and the dynamism of identity over time; (3) we show how reflexivity is a socially and culturally embedded practice, rather than a neutral and universal cognitive practice; and (4) we foreground the power dynamics of reflexivity, cautioning against the co-option of reflexivity in ways that perpetuate social inequities and mask hierarchies within research. To support robust reflexive practices, we offer a toolkit of questions that can act as prompts for critical engagements with reflexivity, and argue for the creation of more robustly reflexive methodological resources.

Reflexive Reflexivity

“We advocate for *robust reflexivity,* a practice that critically reflects on reflexivity itself.”

‪By @catherinetrundle.bsky.social and colleagues

Open Access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Thabks for posting @markrubin.bsky.social

Maja Vahlberg:“I watched a reindeer stay in the same patch of shade for three days straight without grazing, a quiet sign of the strain the heat was causing,”

NEW RESEARCH: Parked cars can account for 10 percent of the surface areas of some cities. It turns out that their albedo (reflectivity) can significantly contribute to the urban heat island effect.

Dark-coloured cars are the worst, making the air around them 3.8°C hotter vs nearby asphalt road.

🧵

Overheated homes: why UK housing is dangerously unprepared for impact of climate crisis Building rules have been focused on keeping warm in winter and saving on energy bills, not cooling down

Brutality of climate harm and dangerous heat. Especially harmful to the poorest & most vulnerable. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

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Over the last couple of years we've created a guide to ethnographic Interviewing
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
and explored the differences between diverse types of ethnography
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A deeply rewarding project! We're enjoying the conversations it's generating.

This article adds to my ongoing work with Tarryn Phillips on making ethnography accessible and welcoming to newcomers, and supporting ethnographers to articulate their unique approach and epistemic orientation when working in interdisciplinary settings.

Ethnographic document analysis: A guide to dwelling with documents - Catherine Trundle, Tarryn Phillips, 2025 In this article, we propose a method for ethnographic document analysis (EDA) and outline the key sensibilities and processes involved. Despite the ubiquity of ...

New Article: a methodological guide to ethnographic document analysis. A non prescriptive but practical resource for dwelling with documents #ethnography #qualitativemethods

Brilliant research on depersonalisation, the way our economy can reduce capacity for existentially recognising others, and the empathic failure built into the profit motives of tech.

Does One Health need an ontological turn? One Health has gained global prominence in recent years. Alongside its emergence, there have been extensive social science critiques. In this contribution, we make the case for the value of recent ...

Our latest plug for the value of anthropological theory in applied contexts. Writing led by my colleague Andrea Kaiser Grolimund @swisstph.ch with collaboration from the Alive Africa project team. Funding: @erc.europa.eu Does One Health need an ontological turn? www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Carceral heat exposure as harmful design: An integrative model for understanding the health impacts of heat on incarcerated people in the United States In an era of climate change-driven weather events, extreme heat has become the most lethal form of “natural disaster” in the United States. However, i…

The first peer-reviewed article coming out of the @uclaheatlab.bsky.social, co-authored with four of the students in my lab. Incarcerated folks are at the frontline of climate change. Incarceration makes people more likely to experience heat-related illness and death (1/5)

Teaching Ecological Distress This collection is compiled by the Ecological Distress Collective, hosted at SOAS Anthropology. Introduction In recent years, the medical and psy...

It was great to be part of compiling this teaching tool, following a workshop at @soasuni.bsky.social last year.

The writing exercise I propose (entitled the 'Speculative Dictionary of Climate Emotion') is in the section on 'Grappling with Distress'.

culanth.org/fieldsights/...

#climatecrisis

"We have to try to protect time & space to be inefficient with each other in as many places as we want to have healthy relationships. All the places that we have contact with each other, every single one of our relationships holds political power, responsibility & ideally some degree of reciprocity"

Trump is making workplaces more dangerous for workers.

He's frozen all rulemaking at OSHA, including a rule that would make sure that people who work in extreme heat are able to take breaks and drink water.

‘How did we miss this for so long?’: The link between extreme heat and preterm birth “How did we miss this for so long? Women are often the last to get studied. But the most vulnerable people are those who are pregnant.”

‘How did we miss this for so long?’: The link between extreme heat and preterm birth.

Heat waves are making pregnancy more dangerous and exacerbating existing maternal health disparities.

grist.org/health/ferti...

#Birth #PrematureBirth #Climate #Fertility

Global cities grapple with how to cool ‘urban heat islands’ Climate change has made tackling damaging temperature disparities increasingly urgent

“On the streets of Paris, thousands of trees are being planted…”

Replacing concrete with greenery has a key role to play in reducing the impact of extreme heat, saving lives and making cities healthier places to get around.

4 effects of heat on mental health (and how to protect yourself) Rising temperatures can affect your mental health, causing depression, anger and trouble concentrating. Learn the signs of heat-related mental health issues.

As many parts of South Australia exceed 43 degrees Celsius today, it’s timely to consider potential heat impacts on physical and mental health. Priority populations include lower SES groups, rough sleepers, older persons, and people with a mental health condition. www.uclahealth.org/news/article...

South Marysburgh resident Jennifer Ackerman surveys a turbine base base rem her property last week. Crows are remaining on currently dismantling the remain ing infrastructure from wpd Canarts's cancelled White Pines Wind Project. Ackerman says she does not want the base removed, rather to personal shrine to Turbine No. 9. BRUCE BALL remain as hen TURBINE NO. 9

This is one hell of a fantastic long-read by @roycerk2.bsky.social - just, please take in the entire thing

Nuclear advocacy out of Canada and the US has become an active part of the Australian conservative push to extend coal/gas power and kill wind and solar plans...

drilled.media/news/aus-nuc...

Hey #AAA2024 -- many, many of you belong on this Climate Social Science starter park. If you aren't there and want to be, please let me know! And if you are there and don't want to be, of course, let me know that as well. #anthrosky go.bsky.app/S6w6yNz

📢 Join my team! The new @uarizona.bsky.social Heat Resilience Initiative is seeking a Program Coordinator to help address the global challenge of extreme heat by advancing heat research, education, and outreach. arizona.csod.com/ux/...
#universityofarizona #heatresilience #extremeheat

Done!

Shade It’s a civic resource, an index of inequality, and a requirement for public health. Shade should be a mandate for urban designers.

"as deadly, hundred-degree heatwaves become commonplace, we have to learn to see shade as a civic resource shared by all. In shade, overheated bodies return to equilibrium. Blood circulation improves. People think clearly. They see better. In a physiological sense, they are themselves again."

Scientists create fungal battery that needs feeding - then eats itself Yeast and white rot fungus could have a small but ingenious role to play in the energy transition.

🍄⚡Fungal batteries! "You can store the fungal batteries in a dried state and activate them on location by simply adding water and nutrients.

Once it's served its purpose, the biodegradable battery digests itself from the inside." 🍄⚡

Simple way to explain to others how climate change = increased fire risk.

Increased rainfall variability + warmer temperatures = increased fuel aridity.

"The challenge in front of us is to learn how to be critical of our public institutions, without relinquishing hope that these institutions can become less harmful than they were in the past. This present moment of nuclear renewal calls for social uprising and protest—and also civic engagement."

Emotional infiltration My New Year’s resolution this year is not to wait until New Year’s to make resolutions.

“Everything but human connection can be automated, so the prophets of automation have every incentive to denigrate it. It only makes sense that their ‘new frontier of persuasive technologies’ would be put primarily toward that end.”
robhorning.substack.com/p/emotional-...

Generally, people tend to assume planetary albedo is all about snow and ice, but clouds are much more important, at least now during and interglacial.
And still they're one of our biggest problems in #Climatemodels.

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn - Longreads Many of California's native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?

Excellent long read on the impacts of a total fire suppression approach in the Southern California mountains since 1919, that, in working against the ecological cycles of interdependencies between fire, plants and soil, creates enormous stockpiles of fuel and less permeable soil.

Earth shattered heat records in 2023 and 2024: is global warming speeding up? Nature - Nature examines whether the temperature spike is a blip or an enduring — and concerning — trend.

Good Nature piece on the debate about accelerating warming in recent years, and what exceptionally high 2023 and 2024 temperatures might mean: www.nature.com/artic...