Human Response to Natural Disasters

This study elaborates on the connection between socioeconomic status, education, and the ability to respond to natural disasters. Using the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters as teachable moments, I foreground how uneven access to resources and capital leave some people more vulnerable than others to natural disasters and how marginal communities inevitably bear the accompanying repercussions of who gets what, when, and how much in the postdisaster emergency relief and reconstruction phase. This occurs not necessarily and merely through a “natural” disaster, as the Boxer Day Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, but through processes of social, political, and economic disempowerment associated with prior racialized histories and inequitable access to cultural capital.