新奥尔良后卡特里娜飓风时期市政当局对社区与居民的种族化与罪犯化监控手段

本文分析了在卡特里娜飓风前后的时期中,执法机构、市政府官员以及高档居民选区在针对新奥尔良非裔美国工人阶级的性格形成仪式和日常社会实践时,试图对之进行罪犯化和监控的变化方式。这里的仪式和实践包括被称为“第二线”和“超级星期天”的游行活动。本文指出对这些实践的罪犯化和监视行为,只有置于新奥尔良种族化的阶级差异生产中,并将这个生产过程置于社会建构的空间中,才能被理解。在卡特里娜飓风过后的背景下,城市的强制疏散让高档居民选区和专业城市规划者得以将城市重建想象成一个可以通过建筑关系的创造达到的目标,而这种建筑关系可以成为数轮资本投资的载体。这种城市修复的愿景,忽视了一个重要元素,即相关社区的居民非常重视对前卡特里娜飓风时期居民的回归和安置问题,这些前飓风时期的居民正是“第二线”和“超级星期天”的主导者。本文探讨了对“第二线”和“超级星期天”的监管、监督和罪犯化如何长久以来在美国被作为维护霸权秩序的机制,也分析了规划、种族和社区高档化改造之间的亲密联系。     

The Aggregation of Political Rhetoric in Zeitoun

While the initial literary and cultural response to 9/11 consisted mostly of domestic narratives of trauma and mourning that avoided explicit political discourse, narrative representations of Hurricane Katrina, from the beginning, have been highly political. This is a profound, if simplistic, inversion: an act of political violence is de-politicized by its cultural response, while a natural disaster is overtly politicized. While the politicization of Hurricane Katrina is clearly, in part, down to the many accusations of negligence and racism that were immediately leveled at the American government after the post-Katrina flooding of New Orleans, this article argues that a major politicizing factor is and was the de-politicization of 9/11. Many narratives of Hurricane Katrina, therefore, are loaded with an aggregation of dissent and political discourse that relates not just to Katrina but also to 9/11 and the War on Terror. This article focuses specifically on Dave Eggers’s narrative non-fiction account of Katrina, Zeitoun (2009) and the way it responds to the domestication of 9/11 in these early instances of 9/11 fiction, and, in particular Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). It argues that Zeitoun responds to The Road’s conservative, messianic allegory, its retrograde formulation of frontier masculinity and unlikely recourse to the domestic. Eggers’s narrative non-fiction account of Katrina is also a migrant story and it is able to both dramatize the social realities of the War on Terror and build a surprising and affecting narrative of community and pluralism in the wake of disaster. Ultimately, this comparative analysis illuminates a wider and revealing departure from the cultural representation of 9/11 in the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina where texts like Zeitoun, are overtly political and loaded with the weight of two catastrophes.     

Black legislative politics: Examining the issue of voting rights in the post-Hurricane Katrina period

Following Hurricane Katrina, a significant number of black voters were displaced from the New Orleans metropolitan area. With the 2006 New Orleans municipal elections forthcoming, especially the mayoral election, a significant portion of displaced black voters were faced with being disenfranchised, which was a violation of their civil rights and posed a threat to black political leadership in the city. This article examines whether black legislators provided substantive representation to these voters during the post-Hurricane Katrina period. That is, did black legislators advocate a legislative agenda to facilitate access to the ballot for displaced black New Orleans voters? Using a multi-methodological approach, evidence is presented indicating that black legislators did provide substantive representation to black voters by introducing key voting rights bills and voting in a way that was responsive to black concerns which facilitated access to the ballot.     

Factors Affecting Hurricane Evacuation Intentions

Protective actions for hurricane threats are a function of the environmental and information context; individual and household characteristics, including cultural worldviews, past hurricane experiences, and risk perceptions; and motivations and barriers to actions. Using survey data from the Miami‐Dade and Houston‐Galveston areas, we regress individuals’ stated evacuation intentions on these factors in two information conditions: (1) seeing a forecast that a hurricane will hit one's area, and (2) receiving an evacuation order. In both information conditions having an evacuation plan, wanting to keep one's family safe, and viewing one's home as vulnerable to wind damage predict increased evacuation intentions. Some predictors of evacuation intentions differ between locations; for example, Florida respondents with more egalitarian worldviews are more likely to evacuate under both information conditions, and Florida respondents with more individualist worldviews are less likely to evacuate under an evacuation order, but worldview was not significantly associated with evacuation intention for Texas respondents. Differences by information condition also emerge, including: (1) evacuation intentions decrease with age in the evacuation order condition but increase with age in the saw forecast condition, and (2) evacuation intention in the evacuation order condition increases among those who rely on public sources of information on hurricane threats, whereas in the saw forecast condition evacuation intention increases among those who rely on personal sources. Results reinforce the value of focusing hurricane information efforts on evacuation plans and residential vulnerability and suggest avenues for future research on how hurricane contexts shape decision making.     

Priming Implicit Racism in Television News: Visual and Verbal Limitations on Diversity

We highlight an understudied aspect of racism in television news, implicit racial cues found in the contradictions between visual and verbal messages. We compare three television news broadcasts from the first week after Hurricane Katrina to reexamine race and representation during the disaster. Drawing together insights from interdisciplinary studies of cognition and sociological theories of race and racism, we examine how different combinations of the race of reporters and news sources relate to the priming of implicit racism. We find racial cues that are consistent with stereotypes and myths about African Americans—even in broadcasts featuring black reporters—but which appear only in the context of color‐blind verbal narration. We conclude by drawing attention to the unexpected and seemingly unintended reproduction of racial ideology.     

Bridging the Organizational Divide: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of United States and International Humanitarian Service Delivery Structures

Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the New Orleans, Louisiana metropolitan area in August 2005, made many United States citizens more aware of how their national government undertakes its humanitarian relief responsibilities. Many learned for the first time, for example, that the federal government is a secondary responder and attends to natural disasters only when states and localities request such support and assistance. That U.S. framework and the international relief implementation structure are remarkably similar. This paper compares and contrasts these two aid implementation approaches with an eye to clarifying their similarities and differences and to identifying how each might better be understood for the future to secure improved coordination and more effective outcomes.

The Emergent Organization: Improvisation and Order in Gulf Coast Disaster Relief

This article employs the interactionist concept of emergence to explore volunteer behavior in organizational settings after natural disasters. Through a several‐year ethnographic study of volunteer relief groups in the Post‐hurricane Gulf Coast, I examine how emergent social groups navigate situations where interactional norms, practices, and procedures are ambiguous, unclear, or in continual flux. Grassroots volunteer groups improvised organizational decision‐making and leadership structures to develop timely and appropriate responses to the post‐disaster environment. In particular, I focus on two distinct groups of volunteers whose response to these emergent interactional structures: improvisers embraced the ambiguity of group norms as an opportunity to innovate and express their creativity, whereas ritualists rejected the lack of structure and order characterized by the volunteer organizations.     

A Quiet Suffering: Some Notes on the Sociology of Suffering1

Despite a recent increase in attention within the social sciences, suffering remains for the most part outside of the purview of sociologists. In this essay, I explore the possibilities for a sociology of suffering by briefly interrogating suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward, the epicenter of the hurricane and the federal levee failures.     

Social Network Methodology in the Study of Disasters: Issues and Insights Prompted by Post-Katrina Research

Dynamic social networks, a key concept in modern social science research, are beginning to play a major role in understanding the ways in which individuals and communities respond to disasters. The authors of this paper review the relevant theory and research regarding how crises cause change in social networks, and how those changes may or may not facilitate recovery, as a function of the kinds of changes that occur. It applies the In/Out/Seeker/Provider (IOSP) framework to identify categories in which we might study disasters and the impact both on the networks and the impacts to the networks. This paper details options for applying social network analysis to research of both pre- and post-disaster settings and concludes by framing a research agenda for the future study of the dynamics of network change following a disaster.     

President Bush's image repair discourse on Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the surrounding area on August 29, 2005. This storm was devastating, causing death, injury, dislocation, and massive property damage. President Bush came under fire for the apparently slow and inept federal response. On September 15 President Bush gave a speech to repair his image. He employed three principal strategies: bolstering, defeasibility, and corrective action. An evaluation of how these strategies were used in his persuasive message judged his image repair effort to be largely ineffective. Bolstering did not counteract the slow response (e.g., Bush waited days to visit the area). Defeasibility is risky for a president to use because it explicitly portrays him as unable to solve the problem. Corrective action was too little (often proposals rather than direct action—and proposals with important unanswered questions) too late. Evidence of the public reaction is consistent with this unfavorable evaluation.