Friday, November 21st, 2025 | 10:30 – 11:50am | Location: 1605 Tilia St., Davis CA
Alesia Montgomery, Assistant Professor, UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
Join via Zoom (passcode: ucdenergy)
Join us for the UC Davis Energy & Efficiency Institute’s Fall 2025 Energy Seminar Series. These weekly Friday morning seminars feature leaders in energy and climate research, providing insights for students, professionals, and the public.
’Warm Water, Warm Rain’: Overwhelming Heat and the Climate of Care in South Los Angeles
Extreme heat kills more people in the U.S. than any other weather event. There is considerable study of the capacities of power grids to maintain air conditioners during extreme heat, but there is inadequate evaluation of whether hot days may overload caregivers. Lack of support is a major risk factor for illness and death during extreme heat, but the labor of care—especially the unpaid care that tends to be women’s work—is often undervalued and invisible. The burdens that mothers face across unequal geographies is poorly understood, and there is scarce recognition of their interlocking challenges. The perils of heat are intensified by other disasters—storms, wildfires—that have combined impacts on the natural-and-built environment. To explore the stresses of caregivers, my research team conducted a case study of Latina and Black mothers in South LA, a mostly Latino area (64%) with a sizable Black population (25%). We interviewed the mothers from July to September 2023. That year, after a cool June, Los Angeles had a July heatwave. This heatwave was followed by a strong August storm that led the governor to declare a state of emergency. The mothers described the complex practices, contexts, and meanings that shaped their stresses.
Alesia Montgomery is an Assistant Professor at UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability (IoES). An ethnographer, Montgomery studies the social and environmental justice concerns of low-income, racialized communities. Her book, Greening the Black Urban Regime: The Culture and Commerce of Sustainability in Detroit, focuses on battles over the aims and strategies of green redevelopment. Her publications also include articles in the International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, City & Community, Ethnography, Antipode, Sociological Perspectives, and Global Networks.
Currently, Montgomery is studying (1) the politics and consequences of water insecurity in low-income, racialized communities and (2) constructions of political, cultural, and research bridges across communities to evaluate, re-imagine, and rebuild connections with water. Montgomery’s areas of research and teaching expertise span urban studies, environmental sociology, sociology of technology, race/class/gender/sexuality, social theory, and qualitative methods. She is involved in collaborations across institutions to develop new methods and tools for gathering, analyzing, preserving, and sharing qualitative data about environmental problems, in ways that further the rigor of research and its accessibility to communities. As part of this work, she serves on the Research Advisory Board for the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) at Syracuse University.
Montgomery holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Political Science from UC Irvine. She was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley, and a Rockefeller Graduate Summer Internship in Womanist Studies at the University of Georgia.
