Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans: Contributing An Embeddedness Perspective to Disaster Research and Policy

BACKGROUND & PURPOSE. The situation of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans is generally portrayed as a ‘natural disaster' – an anomalous ‘event' that disrupted lives, spaces, organizations and institutions. Researchers and policymakers thus focused ahistorically on behavioral, geophysical, managerial, or technological aspects of the event and on reestablishing the perceived pre-disruption order. Given the glacial post-Katrina progress, this paper uses findings from ethnographic research conducted in New Orleans pre- and post-Katrina to assess the contribution a sociological embeddedness perspective might make to disaster and pre-disaster situations. An embeddedness perspective views such situations from multiple locations and histories and from an interactional, intersectional lens and epistemology. Network ties, social relations, meaning-making processes, and structural conditions thus become interrelated sites of inquiry and attention. METHODS. The data here are part of a longitudinal, grant-funded ethnographic study of economic mobility in five U.S. cities—one of which was New Orleans. The research team gathered prospective and retrospective data (1998-2003) from 25 low-income families (five extended families in N.O.) and about 1000 auxiliaries (about 200 in N.O.), including job training providers and instructors, employers, faith personnel, and social service providers. The team revisited New Orleans in February 2006 to gather post-Katrina empirical material and conducted additional follow-up thereafter. Methods included direct and participant observation, informal, systematic in-depth and elite interviews, shadowing, and review of documents and administrative and census data. Qualitative software facilitated data management and construction of narrative accounts. Triangulation through multiple researchers, respondents and analysts, and “valedictory revisiting” (Burawoy, 2003), helped to reduce bias and increase the authenticity and credibility of the findings. RESULTS. The narratives reveal that even before Hurricane Katrina, the environment in New Orleans seldom supported the productivity of lower-earning families. The limited educational, residential, and employment infrastructure in which the families had been embedded for decades was worsened but not caused by Katrina. For example, “Rachel's” pre-Katrina full-time construction position had regularly allotted her only part-time work, such that her projected 2003 income of $28,204 actually amounted to about $6,000. Now, Rachel's former supervisor reported that the post-storm exodus of carpentry journeymen, an influx of migrants, and persistent electricity outages hinder construction industry recovery, and Rachel's return is further thwarted by insufficient affordable housing. Similarly, the pre-Katrina challenges for “Nasir” of distant welding jobs and inadequate transportation are compounded now by the fact that only 19% of busses are in use and only half the pre-Katrina routes are covered. IMPLICATIONS. These and other employment and infrastructure limitations obviously intersected to limit family economic opportunity pre-Katrina, yet they were and remain addressed as independent phenomena. In contrast, an embeddedness perspective and its concepts of weak, strong and differentiated tie networks suggest attending to a dynamic continuum of interrelated social and infrastructure processes. For example, adding, and ultimately evaluating, a participatory, community-generated assessment of organization and family network ties to risk protocols, such as the Social Vulnerability Index, could help to identify a menu of targets for sustained infrastructure attention and aligned pre- and post-disaster situation planning and response.