What a useful thing for a national research council to do
SSRC: Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences
“As analyses and ’spin’ of the Katrina crisis grow, we confront the sort of public issue to which a social science response is urgently needed. Accordingly, the SSRC has organized this web forum addressing the implications of the tragedy that extend beyond ‘natural disaster,’ ‘engineering failures,’ ‘cronyism’ or other categories of interpretation that do not directly examine the underlying issues - political, social and economic - laid bare by the events surrounding Katrina … The web forum will be updated daily as we receive essays from a number of distinguished social scientists.”
There is an impressive list of contributors, and of the essays currently available online, these ones immediately caught my eye:
New Orleans: The Public Sphere of the Disaster
Monika Krause, sociology, New York University
Cities Under Siege: Katrina and the Politics of Metropolitan America
Stephen Graham, geography, Durham University
An Imperfect Storm: Narratives of Calamity in a Liberal-Technocratic Age
Alex de Waal, anthropology, SSRC
Seeing and Not Seeing: Complicity in Surprise
Virginia R. Dominguez, anthropology, University of Iowa
Disasters and Forced Migration in the 21st Century
Anthony Oliver-Smith, anthropology, University of Florida
There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster
Neil Smith, anthropology and geography, CUNY Graduate Center
(via antropologi.info)