Social Science Research Council

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in early September 2005, it wrought enormous destruction in physical property, in disrupted human lives, in the social texture of a vibrant city. It also raised basic social science questions and created an urgent need for social science knowledge to inform public action. Indeed, it made publicly manifest the centrality of social factors to understanding what some persisted in calling a “natural” disaster.

The ways in which race, gender, class, and age structured the impact of Hurricane Katrina were clearly in the foreground. Understanding the responses of different social institutions to the emergency the hurricane created was also immediately significant. But as important were questions about why vulnerabilities and preparedness were structured as they were. These demanded inquiries into the relationship between built and natural environment, population dynamics and urban growth, and determinants of government investment (or lack of investment, in the case of New Orleans’ inadequate levees) – among many other issues. Equally, the forced exodus from New Orleans raised crucial sociological concerns. The patterns in who left, where they went, how they reorganized their lives, and whether they would return all raised both empirical and analytic questions that intersected the core themes of race, class and the spatial organization of economic opportunity for both human beings and capital. The process of rebuilding the Gulf Coast has raised a range of additional questions about housing and labor markets, who has voice in decision-making, the relationship of public to private actors, the cohesion and character of neighborhoods, and indeed the cultural and social meaning of the city itself.

To advance the latter agenda, a small group including American Sociological Association President-Elect Frances Fox Piven, former ASA presidents Troy Duster and Kai Erikson, and SSRC president Craig Calhoun convened shortly after the Hurricane. The meeting sought both to provide help to sociologists uprooted by the disaster, to help mobilize the production of needed sociological knowledge, and to explore ways to encourage the intellectual response of sociologists. The SSRC had independently organized a web forum on Katrina to bring together sociologists familiar with the affected area to help chart an agenda. The ASA Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline made a small grant to Kai Erikson to bring sociologists together in New Orleans and help to chart an agenda. This helped to lead to the creation of a Task Force on Hurricane Katrina based at the SSRC, supported by the MacArthur and Russell Sage Foundations, and chaired by Kai Erikson.

The Task Force mandate is to help the social scientists working on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath to connect better to each other, to set a collective agenda, to create stronger connections between different lines of intellectual work, and to bring the results of social science analysis to public actors. Several kinds of connections are important. The problems posed by Hurricane Katrina speak to different subfields of sociology, for example, from race to urban to demography and most obviously, perhaps, to the sociology of disasters. It is important for sociologists working mainly in one of these fields to be aware of the work of colleagues in others. The Task Force is especially concerned to strengthen connections between disaster research and other fields. Likewise, the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the challenges of rebuilding the Gulf Coast have attracted a range of researchers from around the United States (and indeed other countries). These need connections to the sociologists with long experience of working in New Orleans and intimate knowledge of local conditions and resources. Not least, many younger sociologists are exploring dissertation projects responding to the disaster. They need connections to more senior sociologists working in relevant subfields but often not in their home departments – and for that matter, to each other.

To support the work of the Task Force, the SSRC has begun development of a web-based “research hub” that will facilitate sharing of data and analyses among researchers we well as broader access to completed research. It should be especially useful to those starting new research projects who will find not only bibliographical information and links to intellectual resources but a map of work in progress that will help them plan their own better.

Other sociologists active in the Task force include those noted in section II below as well as the following members of an SSRC Advisory Board: Eric Klinenberg, Shirley Laska, Harvey Molotch, Katherine Newman, Walter Peacock, Charles Perrow, Havidan Rodriguez, James Short, Kathleen Tierney, Mary Waters, and William Julius Wilson. Andrew Lakoff, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego has taken a leave of absence to join the SSRC staff leading this project. He is also helping to develop a broader portfolio of research into the privatization of risk, the vulnerability and security of vital systems, and the nature and social construction of emergencies, preparedness and response.

At the meeting in New York, Kai Erikson cited a group of sociologists who have done a good deal of work on disasters in general and on the environmental vulnerabilities of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in particular and who have been meeting for several years. Several members of that group gathered a few days later in Lafayette, Louisiana, to begin discussion of a research agenda that seemed crucial to the work of learning from Katrina and using that learning to help repair the human damage done by it. That gathering included Erikson, William Freudenburg, Robert Gramling, Stephen Kroll-Smith, Shirley Laska, and John Stephen Picou. That core of persons met five weeks later in Mobile, Alabama, joined this time by Lee Clarke, Duane Gill, Brent Marshall, Havidan Rodriguez, and Dennis Wenger. The group then met a third time in New Orleans in March of this year, joined on this occasion by Walter Peacock and Kathleen Tierney.

The research priorities that emerged from those discussions are as follows. They should be understood as general headings rather than particular proposals, although work along those lines is either in the planning stage or under way.