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.
More than fifteen years later, Hurricane Katrina maintains a
strong grip on the American imagination. The reason is not simply
that Katrina was an event of enormous scale, although it certainly
was ...by any measure one of the most damaging storms in American
history. But, quite apart from its lethality and destructiveness,
Katrina retains a place in living memory because it is one of the
most telling disasters in our recent national experience, revealing
important truths about our society and ourselves.
The final volume in the award-winning Katrina Bookshelf series
Higher Ground reflects upon what we have learned about
Katrina and about America. Kai Erikson and Lori Peek expand our
view of the disaster by assessing its ongoing impact on individual
lives and across the wide-ranging geographies where displaced New
Orleanians landed after the storm. Such an expanded view, the
authors argue, is critical for understanding the human costs of
catastrophe across time and space. Concluding with a broader
examination of disasters in the years since Katrina-including
COVID-19- The Continuing Storm is a sobering meditation on
the duration of a catastrophe that continues to exact steep costs
in human suffering.
Hurricane Katrina forced the largest and most abrupt displacement in U.S. history. About 1.5 million people evacuated from the Gulf Coast preceding Katrina’s landfall. New Orleans, a city of 500,000, ...was nearly emptied of life after the hurricane and flooding. Katrina survivors eventually scattered across all fifty states, and tens of thousands still remain displaced. Some are desperate to return to the Gulf Coast but cannot find the means. Others have chosen to make their homes elsewhere. Still others found a way to return home but were unable to stay due to the limited availability of social services, educational opportunities, health care options, and affordable housing. The contributors to Displaced have been following the lives of Katrina evacuees since 2005. In this illuminating book, they offer the first comprehensive analysis of the experiences of the displaced. Drawing on research in thirteen communities in seven states across the country, the contributors describe the struggles that evacuees have faced in securing life-sustaining resources and rebuilding their lives. They also recount the impact that the displaced have had on communities that initially welcomed them and then later experienced “Katrina fatigue" as the ongoing needs of evacuees strained local resources. Displaced reveals that Katrina took a particularly heavy toll on households headed by low-income African American women who lost the support provided by local networks of family and friends. It also shows the resilience and resourcefulness of Katrina evacuees who have built new networks and partnered with community organizations and religious institutions to create new lives in the diaspora.
As the nation tried to absorb the shock of the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Americans were caught up in an unprecedented wave of backlash violence. Public discussion revealed that widespread misunderstanding ...and misrepresentation of Islam persisted, despite the striking diversity of the Muslim community.
Letting the voices of 140 ordinary Muslim American men and women describe their experiences, Lori Peek's path-breaking book,Behind the Backlash presents moving accounts of prejudice and exclusion. Muslims speak of being subjected to harassment before the attacks, and recount the discrimination they encountered afterwards. Peek also explains the struggles of young Muslim adults to solidify their community and define their identity during a time of national crisis.
Behind the Backlash seeks to explain why blame and scapegoating occur after a catastrophe. Peek sets the twenty-first century experience of Muslim Americans, who were vilified and victimized, in the context of larger sociological and psychological processes. Peek's book will be of interest to those in disaster research studies, sociology of religion, and race and ethnic relations.
An estimated 200 million children worldwide experience various forms of disability. This critical review extrapolates from existing literature in 2 distinct areas of scholarship: one on individuals ...with disabilities in disaster, and the other on children in disaster. The extant literature suggests that various factors may contribute to the physical, psychological, and educational vulnerability of children with disabilities in disaster, including higher poverty rates, elevated risk exposure, greater vulnerability to traumatic loss or separation from caregivers, more strain on parents, and poor postdisaster outcomes, unless medical, familial, social, and educational protections are in place and vital social networks are quickly reestablished. Future research needs are outlined in the conclusion.
This article synthesizes the literature on poverty and disasters in the United States and presents the results from a wide range of studies conducted over the past twenty years. The findings are ...organized into eight categories based on the stages of a disaster event. The review illustrates how people of different socioeconomic statuses perceive, prepare for, and respond to natural hazard risks, how low-income populations may be differentially impacted, both physically and psychologically, and how disaster effects vary by social class during the periods of emergency response, recovery, and reconstruction. The literature illustrates that the poor in the United States are more vulnerable to natural disasters due to such factors as place and type of residence, building construction, and social exclusion. The results have important implications for social equity and recommendations for future research and policy implementation are offered.
This study explores the process of religious identity formation and examines the emergence of religion as the most salient source of personal and social identity for a group of second-generation ...Muslim Americans. Drawing on data gathered through participant observation, focus groups, and individual interviews with Muslim university students in New York and Colorado, three stages of religious identity development are presented: religion as ascribed identity; religion as chosen identity; and religion as declared identity. This research illustrates how religious identity emerges in social and historical context and demonstrates that its development is variable rather than static. Additionally, I discuss the impacts of September 11 and show how a crisis event can impel a particular identity—in this case, religious—to become even more central to an individual's concept of self. Through asserting the primacy of their religious identity over other forms of social identity, religion became a powerful base of personal identification and collective association for these young Muslims.
The goal of this article is twofold: to clarify the tenets of convergence research and to motivate such research in the hazards and disaster field. Here, convergence research is defined as an ...approach to knowledge production and action that involves diverse teams working together in novel ways – transcending disciplinary and organizational boundaries – to address vexing social, economic, environmental, and technical challenges in an effort to reduce disaster losses and promote collective well-being. The increasing frequency and intensity of disasters coupled with the growth of the field suggests an urgent need for a more coherent approach to help guide what we study, who we study, how we conduct studies, and who is involved in the research process itself. This article is written through the lens of the activities of the National Science Foundation-supported CONVERGE facility, which was established in 2018 as the first social science-led component of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI). Convergence principles and the Science of Team Science undergird the work of CONVERGE, which brings together networks of researchers from geotechnical engineering, the social sciences, structural engineering, nearshore systems, operations and systems engineering, sustainable material management, and interdisciplinary science and engineering. CONVERGE supports and advances research that is conceptually integrative, and this article describes a convergence framework that includes the following elements: (1) identifying researchers; (2) educating and training researchers; (3) setting a convergence research agenda that is problem-focused and solutions-based; (4) connecting researchers and coordinating functionally and demographically diverse research teams; and (5) supporting and funding convergence research, data collection, data sharing, and solutions implementation.
This study evaluated how individuals living on the Gulf Coast perceived hurricane risk after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It was hypothesized that hurricane outlook and optimistic bias for hurricane ...risk would be associated positively with distance from the Katrina‐Rita landfall (more optimism at greater distance), controlling for historically based hurricane risk and county population density, demographics, individual hurricane experience, and dispositional optimism. Data were collected in January 2006 through a mail survey sent to 1,375 households in 41 counties on the coast (n = 824, 60% response). The analysis used hierarchal regression to test hypotheses. Hurricane history and population density had no effect on outlook; individuals who were male, older, and with higher household incomes were associated with lower risk perception; individual hurricane experience and personal impacts from Katrina and Rita predicted greater risk perception; greater dispositional optimism predicted more optimistic outlook; distance had a small effect but predicted less optimistic outlook at greater distance (model R2= 0.21). The model for optimistic bias had fewer effects: age and community tenure were significant; dispositional optimism had a positive effect on optimistic bias; distance variables were not significant (model R2= 0.05). The study shows that an existing measure of hurricane outlook has utility, hurricane outlook appears to be a unique concept from hurricane optimistic bias, and proximity has at most small effects. Future extension of this research will include improved conceptualization and measurement of hurricane risk perception and will bring to focus several concepts involving risk communication.
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