Abstract
In Surviving Katrina, Jessica Warner Pardee presents a qualitative study of low-income African American women who survived Hurricane Katrina, working from her position as a sociologist and a Hurricane Katrina survivor herself. She did fifty-one in-depth telephone interviews to gather her data. Her book has two purposes: first, to examine the preparation, survival, and recovery of the low-income African American women who lived through Hurricane Katrina and to evaluate whether these women were able to transfer poverty-survival strategies to the context of the hurricane; and second, to guide readers through the experience of Hurricane Katrina through the lives of the women she interviewed. Pardee wants the reader to see how these women, who already faced multiple inequalities, survived, evacuated, and recovered when Hurricane Katrina stripped away the limited resources they previously had. The author presents the need for better disaster-relief policy for marginalized communities and proposes a redefinition of disaster recovery for low-income people. After theoretical discussions of poverty, survival strategies, and disaster recovery, Pardee organizes the book based on the chronology of possibilities (i.e., evacuation, displacement, return) that represent various pathways evacuees could and did follow.
The author drew several conclusions from her study about the failure of the local and national government to provide aid to marginalized communities and about the need to redefine recovery. Pardee explains that because all of the women in her sample relied on need-based assistance provided by the government, the absence of this assistance after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina led to homelessness and deeper levels of poverty. She evaluated work-based, kin-based, and aid-based survival strategies to see which were effective. Out of the three, work-based survival strategies were the least effective. Kin-based strategies were the most effective, and aid-based survival strategies were only effective to those who were in locations where aid was available.
In contrast with a common definition of recovery—a community seeking normalization—the author redefines disaster recovery for low-income people as staying alive, but living in deeper, more devastating poverty than before. Those who are interested in intersectional inequality and disaster-relief policy will find this book useful.