Displaced Life in the Katrina Diaspora
Monday, June 11, 2012
Monday, June 11, 2012
Weber, Lynn and Peek, Lori, eds. Displaced Life in the Katrina Diaspora. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 2012 $55.00 (Cloth) $24.95 (Paper)
The contributors to Displaced have been following the lives of Katrina evacuees since 2005. In this illuminating book, they offer the first comprehensive analysis of the experiences of the displaced. Drawing on research in thirteen communities in seven states across the country, the contributors describe the struggles that evacuees have faced in securing life-sustaining resources and rebuilding their lives. They also recount the impact that the displaced have had on communities that initially welcomed them and then later experienced “Katrina fatigue” as the ongoing needs of evacuees strained local resources. Displaced reveals that Katrina took a particularly heavy toll on households headed by low-income African American women who lost the support provided by local networks of family and friends. It also shows the resilience and resourcefulness of Katrina evacuees who have built new networks and partnered with community organizations and religious institutions to create new lives in the diaspora.
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The Katrina Bookshelf from the University of Texas
A number of studies of Katrina have appeared over the past six years. Most were brief glances at some fragment of that immense disaster rather than rich, in-depth portraits of it, and many rode the crest of Katrina’s celebrity for the time it was in the news. The Katrina Bookshelf, by contrast, is the result of a national effort to bring experts together in a collaborative program of research on the human costs of the disaster.
The program itself was supported by the Ford, Gates, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage Foundations, and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. This is the most comprehensive social science coverage of a disaster to be found anywhere in the literature. It is also a deeply human story being told here.
The series is edited by Kai Erikson