Degree

BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)

Faculty / School

School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)

Department

Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts

Date of Award

Spring 2026

Date of Submission

2026-07-18

Advisor

Dr. Abdul Haque Chang, Assistant Professor, Department ofSocial Sciences

Project Type

SSLA Culminating Experience

Access Type

Restricted Access

Keywords

heat, coping mechanisms, learned helplessness, female domestic workers, extreme heat, Karachi

Abstract

In my project, I want to look at how female house-helps in Kausar Niazi Colony, Karachi, experience and cope with extreme heat exposure psychologically. By conducting ten in-depth qualitative interviews with a group of women spanning three generations, along with auto-ethnographic field notes from my own site visits, I aim to understand how their coping responses to heat are shaped by what I call infrastructural abandonment, which is a condition in which the formal mechanisms that might enable problem-focused coping have been systematically and historically withheld. Some of the questions I explore are how women manage the physical and emotional toll of heat while sustaining both domestic and waged labour and how their responses reflect a pattern of learned helplessness. Using a thematic coding framework drawn from reflexive thematic analysis and informed by the stress-coping model, theories of allostatic load, and the concept of idioms of distress, I identify a set of interconnected patterns across my research. I argue throughout that heat coping among these women is less a personal failing than a structural one and produced by decades of infrastructural neglect that long precede the specific summer in which any one symptom appears.

Pages

55

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