Creating Katrina, Rebuilding Resilience: Lessons from New Orleans on Vulnerability and Resiliency

Creating Katrina, Rebuilding Resilience: Lessons from New Orleans on Vulnerability and Resiliency presents a unique, integrative understanding of Hurricane Katrina in the New Orleans area, and the progression to disaster vulnerability as well as resilience pathways. The book integrates the understanding of vulnerability and resiliency by examining the relationships among these two concepts and theories.

The disaster knowledge of diverse disciplines and professions is brought together in this book, with authors from social work, public health, community organizing, sociology, political science, public administration, psychology, anthropology, geography and the study of religion. The editors offer both expert and an insider perspectives on Katrina because they have lived in New Orleans and experienced Katrina and the recovery. An improved understanding of the recovery and reconstruction phases of disaster is also presented, and these disaster stages have been the least examined in the disaster and emergency management literature.

Integrates multiple disciplines to study the long-term recovery of the worst non-terrorist disaster in U.S. historyProvides a local perspective, with at least one co-contributor for each chapter living in New OrleansExamines vulnerability and resilience theory and application

PART I. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 1. Editors’ introduction: The voices of the barefoot Scholars 2. Settlement shifts in the wake of catastrophe 3. Vulnerability-plus theory: The integration of community disaster vulnerability and resiliency theories 4. A systems approach to vulnerability and resilience in post-Katrina New Orleans 5. “Built-in” structural violence and vulnerability: A common threat to resilient disaster recovery

PART II. DISASTER VULNERABILITY 6. Setting the Stage for the Katrina Catastrophe: Environmental Degradation, Engineering Miscalculation, Ignoring Science, and Human Mismanagement 7. Three centuries in the making: Hurricane Katrina from an historical perspective 8. The resilience in the shadows of catastrophe: Addressing the existence and implications of vulnerability in New Orleans and Southeastern Louisiana 9. Problematizing vulnerability: Unpacking gender, intersectionality, and the normative disaster paradigm

PART III. DISASTER RESILIENCE 10. Culture and resilience: How music has fostered resilience in post-Katrina New Orleans 11. Resilience among vulnerable populations: The neglected role of culture 12. Faith-based organizations in Katrina: The United Methodist Church 13. Collective efficacy, social capital and resilience: An inquiry into the relationship between social infrastructure and resilience after Hurricane Katrina 14. Dynamics of early recovery in two historically low-income New Orleans’ neighborhoods: Treme´ and Central City

PART IV. CONCLUSION AND LESSONS LEARNED 15. The Katrina catastrophe and science: Does experiencing a catastrophe at “ground zero” have impacts on the professional performance/identity of social  scientist survivors? 16. How barefoot scholars were deployed: The good, the bad, the ugly 17. Lessons learned from New Orleans on vulnerability, resilience, and their integration