The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe

This edited collection is the result of a wealth of research presented at the Southern Sociological Society Annual Conference, which was the first association to hold a major conference (March of 2006) in New Orleans after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Although the exact magnitude of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the gulf coast states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana might be contested, it is widely held as the most destructive disaster in our history. With some 20 special Katrinarelated sessions and 80 critical sociological analyses of this disaster, the authors thought it was necessary and important to bring the best of these together in this edited volume. Part I addresses the framing of hurricane Katrina by recognizing how the disaster was sociologically constructed in the media, the increasing role of the military in disaster response and application of militarism as an ideology, and an examination of the occurrence and framing of crime. Part II is concentrated on evacuation processes and how people made decisions about whether to evacuate or not, use of social capital as a resource for evacuation, and the role of religious organizations in sheltering and providing other disaster relief services. Part III examines reaction to and recovery from Hurricane Katrina in several contexts. The chapters focus on college student reactions to the media representations of race, class, and gender after the disaster, the importance of perceptions and attachments to place as a source of social change, the unique benefit of community-based research in meeting the localized needs of communities that were affected by the hurricanes in local redevelopment plans, and a theoretical examination of the planning process for bringing unique cultural elements back to New Orleans. Part IV addresses institutional change in what we might consider the recovery phase by examining Hurricane Katrina’s impact on the future of education, addressing the future of health care and the immediate needs in areas directly impacted, and the role of immigrant labor in rebuilding the gulf coast and its impact on future population and immigration trends. One unique quality of this collection is that the authors call for a “paradigm shift in disaster research and a reorientation and redirection of important research themes throughout the broader discipline of sociology” (p. 1). Past conceptualizations of disasters distinguish between two basic forms by stating that natural disasters produce “therapeutic communities” and are consensus crises accompanied by heightened community cohesiveness and morale while technological disasters lead to “corrosive communities,” stigmatizing and dividing community residents by heightening community conflict. More recently, terrorist attacks have been added to this conceptualization. The authors appropriately state that we must abandon such typologies and recognize that all disasters should be viewed as anthropogenic or resulting from human actions and relationships to the environment and that Hurricane Katrina contained elements of natural disasters, technological disasters, and terrorist attacks. This is a very salient point that we all must consider in future disaster preparedness, response and recovery. The second important element of this collection is that it brings issues of race, ethnicity, gender and social class stratification, inequality and oppression to the forefront of our analysis. Katrina is a name that we give to an event that ripped off the “blanket of equality” and revealed the many layers of segregation, inequality, and oppression that have characterized our society for centuries. One example of this stratification is that approximately 68% of New Orleans residents before the storm were African American with over one-third living in poverty. Approximately one in five families did not own an automobile and 8 percent did not have access to phone service (p. 144). This is the real social problem which existed before and will last well beyond the event we have come to know as Katrina. For students of disaster research, this collection serves as an excellent example of how to apply the sociological imagination to disaster events.