When the Researcher Needs a Heat Action Plan: Reflections from Patna, April 2025
Prologue
This essay began as a page in my field diary during ethnographic fieldwork in Patna in April 2025. I had jotted down a few personal reflections on conducting research through two relentless weeks, with temperatures ranging between 42°C and 45°C. They were notes to myself—about the body, the field, and the quiet adaptations that made each day of research possible.
A year later, as conversations about heat and health dominate global headlines and record-breaking temperatures affect cities across South Asia, Europe and elsewhere, I found myself returning to those diary pages. What had seemed like a personal reflection now felt like a reminder that climate change is transforming not only the lives of the communities we study, but also the practice of research itself.
What does it mean to conduct ethnography when extreme heat is no longer an occasional event, but part of everyday life?
Walking the city before the sun took over
April 2025 was one of those months when Bihar, like much of northern India, was gripped by an intense heatwave. Television channels, newspapers and mobile phone alerts repeatedly carried public health advisories. Yet for thousands of people whose livelihoods depended on being outdoors, staying indoors was never really an option.
Nor was it for us.
“Avoid stepping outdoors between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Heatwave conditions continue across Bihar.”
Every morning in mid-April, this was the first message that greeted me from the television in my hotel room. Temperatures were expected to reach 42°C–45°C. The advice was unequivocal: stay indoors, drink plenty of fluids, avoid unnecessary travel and seek shade whenever possible.
Within an hour of hearing the advisory, I would pack my notebook, audio recorder, consent forms, water bottles, oral rehydration salts and field bag before stepping into precisely the conditions everyone was being advised to avoid.
I was in Patna as part of the If Cities Could Speak project, leading the ethnographic component of a study exploring how climate change and extreme heat were shaping health and everyday life in informal urban settlements. Our work involved detailed health histories, transect walks, time spent in neighbourhoods, and listening to residents describe how heat was altering their routines, livelihoods and wellbeing.
But before leaving my room each morning, I found myself thinking about something I had rarely considered so explicitly during previous fieldwork:
My own body.
I was the oldest member of our research team. Over twenty-five years as a medical anthropologist and public health researcher, I have worked in challenging environments—from tuberculosis-affected communities to fragile urban health systems. Yet this fieldwork felt different. Heat was not simply the backdrop to our research. It shaped when we could enter the field, how long we could stay, how we moved through settlements and how people interacted with us.
Climate change was becoming a co-producer of the research itself.
Medical anthropology has long emphasised that the body cannot be understood solely in biological terms. Scheper-Hughes and Lock’s concept of the “mindful body” draws attention to how bodily experience is simultaneously biological, social and political, shaped by the environments and social worlds people inhabit. In Patna, this was not merely a theoretical proposition. Heat, work, health and vulnerability were experienced through the body—and increasingly, so was the research itself.
Ethnography in a city reorganised by heat
Ethnography demands presence.
It cannot be conducted from air-conditioned rooms or understood through temperature charts alone. It requires researchers to walk through neighbourhoods, observe everyday routines, sit in people's homes, wait, listen and notice what often remains invisible. As Tim Ingold reminds us, knowledge is generated through movement and engagement with landscapes rather than through detached observation.
But in Patna, the city itself seemed to tell us when and how that presence was possible.
The streets were vibrant in the early morning, but by midday they emptied. Tea stalls fell quiet. Children disappeared indoors. Older people searched for patches of shade beneath trees or outside neighbourhood shops. Conversations resumed only after the fierce afternoon sun began to relent.
Our research schedule adapted accordingly.
Transect walks were completed in the early morning or late afternoon. Longer health-history interviews often continued into the evening, when families gathered outside their homes and people were more physically comfortable talking.
The field was teaching us how fieldwork needed to be done.
This was more than a logistical adjustment. The changing rhythm of the city became part of what we were observing. Heat was reorganising everyday life—and, inevitably, it was reorganising our research practice too.
My own heat history
Arthur Kleinman has written about illness not simply as a biomedical category, but as lived experience—something people understand through the narratives of everyday life. Throughout my career, I have invited participants to recount their health histories: how illness unfolds, how it disrupts routines and how people make decisions about care.
Looking back, those fourteen days in Patna became a kind of heat history of my own.
Every morning began with a large glass of sattu ghol.
Long before electrolyte drinks became commercially available, families across Bihar and the Gangetic plains have used this simple mixture of roasted gram flour, water, salt and sometimes jaggery to replenish fluids and sustain energy during the summer months. I did not adopt it because I had read about it in a public health advisory. It came from lived knowledge, shared across generations, and became part of my own preparation before entering the field.
Before leaving the hotel, I also applied Navratna oil generously to my scalp. Whether its cooling effect was physiological or psychological hardly mattered. It became a familiar ritual that prepared me mentally for another day in the heat.
Loose cotton clothing replaced anything synthetic. An umbrella and a dupatta to cover my head and face became indispensable. Water bottles and oral rehydration salts accompanied me everywhere. Every shaded tree, roadside tea stall and brief pause beneath an awning became part of an unspoken survival strategy.
Without consciously intending to, I had created my own personal heat action plan.
What struck me most was how closely it resembled the adaptations that participants themselves described.
When the researcher's body becomes part of the method
Being the oldest member of the team made me particularly aware of my physical limits.
Had I drunk enough water?
Should we complete one more interview or pause?
Was this ordinary tiredness, or was I beginning to experience heat exhaustion?
Could we walk through another settlement, or should we wait until the temperature dropped?
These were not simply interruptions to the research. They became part of the research.
My body reminded me that heat is not experienced as a statistic or a temperature reading. It is experienced through thirst, fatigue, slowing down, seeking shade, changing one's route and constantly recalibrating everyday decisions.
My field diary consequently became more than a record of observations. It also became a record of embodied experience.
Yet there was an important difference between my experience and that of the people whose stories I was documenting.
At the end of each day, I returned to a hotel room with electricity, clean drinking water, a fan, air conditioning and the certainty that this fieldwork would end after fourteen days.
For the women and men I met, there was no such respite.
My adaptations were temporary.
Theirs were structural and ongoing.
That distinction stayed with me.
Climate change is changing the practice of research
Throughout my career, I have documented the vulnerabilities of others. Patna prompted me to think about another dimension of vulnerability: that of the researcher.
Research ethics rightly asks us to protect participants through informed consent, confidentiality and the minimisation of harm. But climate change compels us to broaden that conversation.
How do we conduct ethical fieldwork when researchers themselves are exposed to environmental risk?
How should research teams prepare for prolonged heat exposure?
Should climate-responsive fieldwork protocols become as routine as ethical approval?
These questions rarely feature in research methods training, yet they are becoming increasingly relevant as climate extremes intensify.
Protecting researchers is not separate from protecting research quality. A dehydrated researcher cannot observe carefully. An exhausted researcher cannot listen attentively. A researcher struggling with heat may rush an interview, shorten a transect walk or miss what might otherwise have been an important observation.
Climate adaptation is therefore not only about safeguarding field teams. It is also about safeguarding the integrity of the knowledge we produce.
We need to begin thinking about climate-responsive ethnography—an approach that recognises that environmental conditions shape not only the lives of participants, but also the ethics, methods and embodied practice of research itself.
This may mean rethinking fieldwork schedules, providing heat-safety protocols and resources for research teams, building flexibility into research timelines, and treating environmental exposure as part of research risk rather than as an incidental inconvenience.
What Patna taught me
When I returned home, I carried more than notebooks filled with field notes and hours of recorded interviews.
I carried a renewed respect for the ingenuity with which people adapt to increasingly hostile environments.
My morning glass of sattu ghol, the cooling oil on my scalp, the carefully timed transect walks and evening interviews were temporary adaptations that enabled me to complete two weeks of fieldwork.
For residents of Patna's informal settlements, adaptation is not an occasional response to an environmental event.
It is the texture of everyday life.
If cities could speak, Patna would not speak only of rising temperatures. It would speak of the quiet intelligence with which people continue to inhabit an increasingly hostile climate—through routines, relationships, inherited knowledge and countless small acts of adaptation.
As a medical anthropologist, I left Patna with more than field notes. I left with a deeper appreciation that ethnography is itself an embodied practice. In an era of climate change, the researcher's body becomes another site through which climate is experienced, negotiated and understood.