The second edition of The Sociology of Katrina brings together the nation's top sociological researchers in an effort to deepen our understanding of the modern catastrophe that is Hurricane Katrina. Five years after the storm, its profound impact continues to be felt. This new edition explores emerging themes, as well as ongoing issues that continue to besiege survivors. The book has been updated and revised throughout—from data about recovery efforts and environmental conditions, to discussions of major social issues in education, health care, the economy, and crime. The authors thoroughly review the important topic of recovery, both in New Orleans and in the wider area of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This new edition features a new chapter focused on the Katrina experience for people in the primary impact area, or "ground zero," five years after the storm. This chapter uncovers many challenges in overcoming the critical problems caused by the storm of the century. From this important update of the acclaimed first edition, it is apparent that "the storm is not over," as Katrina continues to generate political, economic, community, and personal controversy.
When children experience upheaval and trauma, adults often view them as either vulnerable and helpless or as resilient and able to easily “bounce back.” But the reality is far more complex for the children and youth whose lives are suddenly upended by disaster. How are children actually affected by catastrophic events and how do they cope with the damage and disruption? Children of Katrina offers one of the only long-term, multiyear studies of young people following disaster. Sociologists Alice Fothergill and Lori Peek spent seven years after Hurricane Katrina interviewing and observing several hundred children and their family members, friends, neighbors, teachers, and other caregivers. In this book, they focus intimately on seven children between the ages of three and eighteen, selected because they exemplify the varied experiences of the larger group. They find that children followed three different post-disaster trajectories—declining, finding equilibrium, and fluctuating—as they tried to regain stability. The children’s moving stories illuminate how a devastating disaster affects individual health and well-being, family situations, housing and neighborhood contexts, schooling, peer relationships, and extracurricular activities. This work also demonstrates how outcomes were often worse for children who were vulnerable and living in crisis before the storm. Fothergill and Peek clarify what kinds of assistance children need during emergency response and recovery periods, as well as the individual, familial, social, and structural factors that aid or hinder children in getting that support.
For those interested in learning more about the personal impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, Narrating the Storm serves as an essential read. This important and timeless volume is a compilation of sixteen narratives that address the experiences of Gulf Coast residents, faculty, and graduate students who were caught up in the largest (not so) natural disaster in United States history. Each contributor deploys storytelling sociology as a methodological approach in order to illustrate how â oepersonalâ experiences with disaster are not so personal, but rather reflect and are informed by larger social phenomena related to issues including race, class, gender, age, bureaucracy, risk, collective memory, the blasÃ(c), and more. The narratives in this volume exemplify how inequality and injustice are unveiled, exacerbated, and created by the occurrence of disaster; and reveal the sociological in everyday and not-so-everyday experiences.
The events surrounding Hurricane Katrina offer a remarkable case study of the social divide in the United States. The book includes scholarly articles examining the continued struggle for social justice from the perspectives of communication, criminology, education, ethnic studies, history, justice studies, law, political science, sociology, and urban planning. This multidisciplinary case study approach is a highly effective way of helping readers understand contemporary debates about social justice, including the roles of historically persistent structural inequality, racism and classism, media portrayals of life changing events, government reactions and responsibilities in the face of crises, and the role of public policy and activism in response to social injustice. The collection of articles is divided into three sections representing the causes of, consequences of, and responses to social injustice as illustrated through the case study of Hurricane Katrina. The first section, Images from the Past: Social Justice and Hurricane Katrina in Context, examines the structural inequality and cultural divisions in the United States that make just responses to disasters difficult. The second section, Images of the Disaster: Reactions to Hurricane Katrina, offers analyses of the effects of Hurricane Katrina, the disparities that are highlighted after such a disaster, and the subsequent actions and reactions that emerge in its wake. The third section, Images of the Future: Policy, Activism, and Justice, focuses on public policy and activist efforts aimed at creating a more just society. This second edition includes new chapters on the gender analysis of disaster recovery work and the implementation of socially just post-disaster urban planning efforts. In addition, the introductory and concluding chapters have been significantly rewritten to include expanded theoretical analyses of both the meaning of social disasters and the policy implications for social disasters in the United States. "Editors Bates and Swan...argue convincingly that Hurricane Katrina's severe social and environmental consequences are best apprehended within a social justice framework because the hurricane revealed and magnified extensive, entrenched patterns of racial and class discrimination against impoverished minority residents of New Orleans... The essays are persuasive because they blend topicality with academic rigor, providing many relevant sources, detailed footnotes, and cogent analyses of situations. The book significantly enhances understanding of the historical and contemporary circumstances that created the Hurricane Katrina disaster." -- CHOICE Magazine, on the first edition
This in-depth study of two black neighborhoods in the wake of Hurricane Katrina vividly captures the struggle and uncertainty in the process of rebuilding. Hurricane Katrina was the worst urban flood in American history, a disaster that destroyed nearly the entire physical landscape of a city, as well as the mental and emotional maps that people use to navigate their everyday lives. Left to Chance takes us into two African American neighborhoods—working-class Hollygrove and middle-class Pontchartrain Park—to learn how their residents have experienced “Miss Katrina” and the long road back to normal life. The authors spent several years gathering firsthand accounts of the flooding, the rushed evacuations that turned into weeks- and months-long exile, and the often confusing and exhausting process of rebuilding damaged homes in a city whose local government had all but failed. As the residents’ stories make vividly clear, government and social science concepts such as “disaster management,” “restoring normality,” and “recovery” have little meaning for people whose worlds were washed away in the flood. For the neighbors in Hollygrove and Pontchartrain Park, life in the aftermath of Katrina has been a passage from all that was familiar and routine to an ominous world filled with existential uncertainty. Recovery and rebuilding become processes imbued with mysteries, accidental encounters, and hasty adaptations, while victories and defeats are left to chance.
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana and Mississippi. The storm devastated the region and its citizens. But its devastation did not reach across racial and class lines equally. In an original combination of research and advocacy, Hurricane Katrina: America s Unnatural Disaster questions the efficacy of the national and global responses to Katrina s central victims, African Americans. This collection of polemical essays explores the extent to which African Americans and others were, and are, disproportionately affected by the natural and manmade forces that caused Hurricane Katrina. Such an engaged study of this tragic event forces us to acknowledge that the ways in which we view our history and life have serious ramifications on modern human relations, public policy, and quality of life.
A lethal mix of natural disaster, dangerously flawed construction, and reckless human actions devastated San Francisco in 1906 and New Orleans in 2005. Eighty percent of the built environments of both cities were destroyed in the catastrophes, and the poor, the elderly, and the medically infirm were disproportionately among the thousands who perished. These striking similarities in the impacts of cataclysms separated by a century impelled Steve Kroll-Smith to look for commonalities in how the cities recovered from disaster. In Recovering Inequality, he builds a convincing case that disaster recovery and the reestablishment of social and economic inequality are inseparable. Kroll-Smith demonstrates that disaster and recovery in New Orleans and San Francisco followed a similar pattern. In the immediate aftermath of the flooding and the firestorm, social boundaries were disordered and the communities came together in expressions of unity and support. But these were quickly replaced by other narratives and actions, including the depiction of the poor as looters, uneven access to disaster assistance, and successful efforts by the powerful to take valuable urban real estate from vulnerable people. Kroll-Smith concludes that inexorable market forces ensured that recovery efforts in both cities would reestablish the patterns of inequality that existed before the catastrophes. The major difference he finds between the cities is that, from a market standpoint, New Orleans was expendable, while San Francisco rose from the ashes because it was a hub of commerce.
“This book about risk and disaster—and how they get amplified—is fascinating and hugely important as we face an ever-more-turbulent world.” —Rebecca Solnit, award-winning author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a remarkable number of large-scale disasters. Earthquakes in Haiti and Sumatra underscored the serious economic consequences that catastrophic events can have on developing countries, while 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina showed that first world nations remain vulnerable. The Social Roots of Risk argues against the widespread notion that cataclysmic occurrences are singular events, driven by forces beyond our control. Instead, Kathleen Tierney contends that disasters of all types—be they natural, technological, or economic—are rooted in common social and institutional sources. Put another way, risks and disasters are produced by the social order itself—by governing bodies, organizations, and groups that push for economic growth, oppose risk-reducing regulation, and escape responsibility for tremendous losses when they occur. Considering a wide range of historical and looming events—from a potential mega-earthquake in Tokyo that would cause devastation far greater than what we saw in 2011, to BP’s accident history prior to the 2010 blowout—Tierney illustrates trends in our behavior, connecting what seem like one-off events to illuminate historical patterns. Like risk, human resilience also emerges from the social order, and this book makes a powerful case that we already have a significant capacity to reduce the losses that disasters produce. A provocative rethinking of the way that we approach and remedy disasters, The Social Roots of Risk leaves readers with a better understanding of how our own actions make us vulnerable to the next big crisis—and what we can do to prevent it. “Brilliant . . . Drawing on a trove of timely case studies, Tierney analyses how factors such as speculative finance and rampant development allow natural and economic blips to tip more easily into catastrophe.” —Nature
Katrina's Imprint highlights the power of this sentinel American event and its continuing reverberations in contemporary politics, culture, and public policy. Published on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the multidisciplinary volume reflects on how history, location, access to transportation, health care, and social position feed resilience, recovery, and prospects for the future of New Orleans and the Gulf region. Essays examine the intersecting vulnerabilities that gave rise to the disaster, explore the cultural and psychic legacies of the storm, reveal how the process of rebuilding and starting over replicates past vulnerabilities, and analyze Katrina's imprint alongside American's myths of self-sufficiency. A case study of new weaknesses that have emerged in our era, this book offers an argument for why we cannot wait for the next disaster before we apply the lessons that should be learned from Katrina.
Miller and Rivera explore how the fundamental changes to the physical landscape after Hurricane Katrina set the stage for dramatic changes to come for the city and region, and how these changes altered the economic, cultural, and political lives of the survivors.
