Abstract
The Impact of Natural Disasters on Systemic Political and Social Inequities in the United States open with a bold premise: the advancement of a new theoretical and methodological paradigm for the study of interactions between natural disasters and inequality. In pursuit of this goal, the volume—introduced and edited by political scientist Paul S. Adams and sociologist Geoffrey L. Wood—outlines the need for new, critical approaches to demography and other fields that embrace historical circumstance, power differentiation, and the ways that durable forms of social inequality develop within disasters. Reflecting Charles Tilly’s (1998) assertion that categorical inequalities are embedded within social systems and Kathleen Tierney’s (2007) seminal call for the sociology of natural disasters to better develop theory in other areas of the social sciences, it casts a wide net, pushing the boundaries of what matters in conversations about environmental and disaster justice in important ways.
While the question of whether it achieves its goal of a paradigmatic shift is debatable, the volume provides a timely, thoughtful, and ultimately useful set of tools for social scientists interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the social drivers and consequences of natural disasters. Furthermore, its focus on a variety of types of inequality formation through the disaster experience provides opportunities for theoretical development within both the social sciences of natural hazards and its underlying subject fields. It serves as a platform for those interested in integrating natural hazards with their field and for those already focused on natural hazards to try on a new set of theoretical and explanatory models for size. In this way, it offers valuable opportunities for experienced scholars and newcomers alike to expand their conceptual framing of the ways that durable categorical inequality may be reproduced, exacerbated, or catalyzed throughout the disaster experience.
While the lion’s share of research on natural disasters takes the disaster experience as its focal point, a strength of the book’s contributing chapters lies in the fact that they typically begin with a primer on theory in another field and then demonstrate the conceptual importance of this theory within the study of natural hazards. For example, in Chapter Two Peter Loebach and Julie Stewart lead with an exploration of different types of social capital derived from the study of social networks, with a focus on applying the emergent study of linking capital to disaster contexts. Theoretically rich yet written in a style accessible to those who may be new to social network theory, the authors argue that linking capital represents a necessary supplement to the study of social capital in disaster resilience and vulnerability because it emphasizes the role of connections with outsiders, rather than the common focus on intra-community capital.
Later chapters continue this mission by focusing on other elements of our political and social milieu, including provocative entries into areas of the social sciences that are understudied in the context of disaster. Chapter Three, by editor Paul S. Adams, uses a political science frame to caution that disasters may jeopardize enfranchisement through practical impediments to things like voter registration and voting center access as well as manipulation or misuse of voting laws and regulations. Later, Chapter Six (by Pamela Ray Koch and Dennis Feaster) and Chapter Seven (by Timothy Holler and Reneè D. Lamphere) turn the focus to how the study of natural disasters intersects with criminology, examining how existing inequities related to criminal records, sex offender status, and intellectual disability may be amplified through regular and punitive approaches to disaster sheltering, relief, and aid. These chapters are notable for their introduction of critically understudied—and perhaps in some cases previously unrecognized—elements of the politics and sociology of natural disaster.
While grounded in topics that are seen more commonly in disaster studies, Chapter Four provides an additional illustration of the thematic use of disasters to provide questions that may advance theory across fields. Using Puerto Rico’s regrettable experiences after Hurricane Maria as a focal point, Amílcar Antonio Barreto explores how they reflect the historical relationships between Puerto Rico and the rest of the United States and how they may be instructive about who is considered an American worthy of help. Like David Pellow’s (2018) calls for a renewed commitment to the indispensability of all people, here hurricane response provides a narrative instrument to examine Puerto Rico’s political economic history in light of the tangible outcomes of post-disaster victim blaming, and in turn uses that as an analytical lever to understand fractures in national identity.
Similarly, in Chapter Five Ariane Prohaska explores how different segments of local communities experienced the aftermath of an Alabama tornado to understand perceptions of success in disaster recovery and reconstruction, as well as differences in the goals of aid and recovery processes for those in different social locations. These different locations translate through institutional action and individual experience to not only different levels of satisfaction with the recovery process, but also to goals and expectations as fundamentally different as basic survival versus bouncing back. By moving beyond perceptions to expectations, this chapter also provides critical food for thought about how we consider inequities embedded in recovery processes.
Whether the book succeeds in its bold mission—to provide paradigmatic advancement that advances the study of inequities and natural disaster—remains arguable. On the one hand, at times the chapters, though each has its own merits, seem unrelated and disjointed. In this way the call for paradigmatic change may be lost in the weeds of individual efforts. On the other, there is a sort of paradigmatic challenge to business as usual in the social sciences of natural disaster through the presentation of theory from a variety of fields as the precursor to its elaboration in disaster contexts. By so doing the book, taken in its entirety, serves as both a substantive invitation to scholars in fields as diverse as criminology, social network theory, resilience and recovery, and colonial theory to take a closer look at climate change and disaster. It usefully provides a model for a more integrative, interdisciplinary approach to the study of natural disaster that takes social processes rather than hazard events as the point of departure. In this way the volume provides provocative food for thought for the advancement of the study of natural disaster, inequality, and environmental justice.