Abstract
This paper utilizes Du Bois’ double consciousness, as well as insights from feminist theory and critical pedagogy, to examine the tensions involved in being both a professional sociologist and a New Orleanian affected by Hurricane Katrina. We argue that sociologists from New Orleans face barriers that prevent us from writing and teaching about Katrina ‘objectively’, as many in our discipline demand, while simultaneously discouraging us from engaging in research and teaching that draw on personal experiences with Katrina. We are told by reviewers, editors, and colleagues that our experiences, construed as biases, are inappropriate for our writing and our classrooms. We contend that much important knowledge about Hurricane Katrina will never be created, and the knowledge that is created will be largely written and taught by those who did not experience the storm first-hand. This paper reconciles two conflicted consciousnesses by deconstructing the situation encountered by sociologists from New Orleans.
Keywords
Introduction
On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the coast of Louisiana, and the rising water eventually undermined New Orleans’ levee and flood protection system. In the days and weeks following the storm, as much as 75 percent of the New Orleans metropolitan area found itself under water. Known as a predominantly poor and black city, New Orleans is home to eight major universities, making the city an important source of intellectual capital. This concentration of universities (in a Pre-Katrina city of only 485,000 residents) meant that New Orleans contained an active and thriving intellectual community. Although this community presumably had the resources to secure a safe and timely evacuation, something many New Orleanians did not possess, the severe damage to the city and long displacement period affected everyone. Though shielded by both financial and social resources, the experiences of the academic community merit investigation, as this is a group with formal training to understand, interpret and frame the events that followed the storm.
In this article, we argue that academics from New Orleans face an unusual paradox, one that affects both their academic work and their subjective understandings of their own hurricane experiences. As academics from New Orleans, we possess a double consciousness where, on the one hand, we are expected to be detached and objective scholars who are far removed from our personal and emotional understandings of the Katrina experience. 1 On the other hand, we experienced disaster, and our consciousness as evacuees and displacees necessarily informs our understanding of disaster. However, the expectations of academic colleagues, students, administrators, and journal editors have at times forced us to shelve our deep emotions and political consciousness, which are construed by some within the discipline as biases. This expectation of ‘objectivity’ 2 strips our personal experiences with Katrina from our academic work and limits the ability to connect our lived experiences of disaster to bodies of academic rhetoric.
This article represents an effort to document and reconcile these two warring identities that we experience as both New Orleanians and academics. In doing so, we make few claims as to the generalizability of our experiences to others living and working in New Orleans and in the greater Gulf Coast. That said, we have every reason to believe that other sociologists from New Orleans share these experiences. The political and epistemological objective of this article is to initiate academic discourse that values experience and insider perspectives as valid and useful sources of knowledge about Katrina and about disaster more broadly, recognizing that sociologists can and should use their theoretical understandings of the world to frame their own experiences and to better understand important social phenomena – such as Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina functions in this sense as a case study, but the larger objective of this article is to use our experiences as academics from New Orleans to interrogate and examine the discipline’s expectations regarding what constitutes ‘good’ sociology, both on paper and in the classroom. Using Du Bois’ (1989 [1903]) double consciousness, we contend that sociologists who were directly impacted by Katrina navigate an identity torn between subjective disaster survivor and objective academic. This conflict informs the lived experiences of doing sociology. We show how at the same time that navigating these competing identities is fraught with difficulty, an insider status provides the opportunity for experience-based research that will enrich our understanding of the effects of disaster.
In the following section, we demonstrate that much of the knowledge about Hurricane Katrina was created by those who did not experience the event first-hand. We provide a theoretical framework for understanding this paradoxical situation in which local academics were placed. In subsequent sections, we demonstrate how this paradox manifests itself in our teaching, our research, and in our professional and departmental interactions. The overall epistemological objective is to create discourse about Hurricane Katrina derived from both sociological insights and first-hand experience.
Katrina: An Event Viewed from the Outside
Immediately following the storm, academics from around the nation saw the opportunity to swiftly and critically analyze Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. From the outset, Katrina was an event more easily explored from the outside. There was a rush to publish on the social consequences and implications of Katrina, and during this crucial period many local academics were busy tending to their families, homes, and otherwise coping with disaster. Scholarship was not our immediate priority in the wake of the storm. This meant that early knowledge about Hurricane Katrina was being created entirely by those who did not experience it themselves.
Only days after the storm, the Social Science Research Council began posting essays on the significance of Hurricane Katrina (SSRC, 2005). Though disaster experts wrote many of these 31 essays, scholars living and working in New Orleans wrote only two and a team of scholars elsewhere in Louisiana wrote one other. In fact, there were more essays written by scholars outside of the USA than by scholars in New Orleans or in Louisiana. Although these writers shared the same academic expertise as local researchers, most of these essays were unable to capture the significance and magnitude of the lived experience of Katrina in the same ways that a locally rooted set of essays would provide.
Although many local scholars were not born and raised in the city, they called New Orleans home and as Fussell (2008: 64–5) reminds us, ‘a New Orleans pedigree requires several generations of residence in the city and a devotion to the particular historical details of the cultural and built environments. Katrina’s flood waters ended that era and baptized us all as New Orleanians.’ She adds that ‘social scientists residing in a community can be valuable resources for rebuilding: they know the ground, they are more likely to be trusted by residents, and they have credibility with outside observers as well as community members.’ New Orleans is a city with a unique culture perhaps best understood by those who are part of the local community (particularly those with several generations of cultural knowledge), and local academics have particular insights to contribute to the burgeoning scholarship on Katrina (through their cultural and geographic expertise, and the trust of local residents). Scott (1991: 776) says that excavating these previously invisible experience-based insights ‘has produced a wealth of new evidence previously ignored … and has drawn attention to dimensions of human life and activity usually deemed unworthy of mention.’ While experience does not mean uncovering ‘complete truths’, it does allow us to broaden our understanding of the impact of specific social phenomena such as Hurricane Katrina. Although qualitative studies of Katrina look at the lived experience of those affected by the storm, we miss out on research inspired from personal experience that may unveil new insights and beget questions different from those explored by scholars who were not directly affected by the disaster. As a result, our collective understanding of Katrina is limited in scope because Katrina was an event analyzed largely by non-New Orleanians.
Shortly after landfall, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the availability of a series of Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) targeted specifically to Katrina research. NSF made this announcement on 16 September 2005, about 17 days after landfall, and set the grant deadline as 23 September 2005. Though these grants have produced important findings about the effects of Hurricane Katrina, the early timing of the deadline made it nearly impossible for local academics – many of whom were securing temporary residence, working to reunite family, dealing with destroyed homes, or concerned about the possible loss of their jobs – to apply. By the end of September, many New Orleans neighborhoods were not yet reopened and local universities (including their grant administration offices and libraries) were still months from resuming business. Several local universities, including our own, had not yet even reestablished email service.
According to NSF data, the 87 small grants given to scholars immediately following Katrina totaled more than $5.5m in funding. As Table 1 indicates, of that $5.5m, approximately 11 percent of the funds went to institutions located in New Orleans, while about 89 percent went outside of New Orleans. However, we know that Katrina was a disaster that devastated large areas of Louisiana, not only the city of New Orleans. The NSF data reveal that only 22 percent of funding went to scholars working in Louisiana, while nearly 80 percent went elsewhere. The conclusion remains the same when we expand the analysis to include the entire affected region – Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana: researchers living and working in those three states account for just over one quarter of the total research dollars committed by the NSF. Even when taking into account the research being done in the social and economic sciences more generally, we see that of the $1,161,303 given in SGER grants within the Social and Economic Sciences Division of NSF, less than 9 percent went to scholars and institutions within New Orleans, while more than 90 percent was awarded outside of New Orleans. Also, while 73 percent of the grant money in all disciplines went to scholars outside of the affected states, within the social and economic sciences nearly 90 percent of funds went outside of the affected region. To the extent that important Katrina research can and must be done in social science disciplines, that which was funded was located almost entirely outside of the affected three-state area. 3
National Science Foundation, Katrina SGER Funding Distribution
Source: National Science Foundation’s (2010) Award Search interface: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/
The reason for presenting these data is not to criticize the National Science Foundation or any other granting agency. Indeed, the speed at which they earmarked money for Katrina-related research is both honorable and noteworthy. However, due to challenges faced by local academics (coupled with a short timeline for proposals) most of this money was awarded to non-local academics. These findings demonstrate that from the very beginning, Katrina was a phenomenon analyzed and understood by researchers outside of the city of New Orleans, outside of the state of Louisiana and, in large part, outside of the affected region. The decision not to flag a portion of the funds specifically for scholars from the affected area suggests that we as an academic community often do not recognize or acknowledge the importance of experience in producing understandings of an event (for a feminist methodological discussion of this see Harding, 1987, 2004; Smith, 1990, 2004).
Books published two years after Katrina heavily reflect the voices of non-locals. For example, the anthology The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe (Brunsma et al., 2007) includes 13 empirical articles on the storm and its aftermath. Of the 36 contributing authors and editors, nine (25%) identify themselves as New Orleanians and are/were affiliated with institutions in New Orleans. An additional four authors (for a total of just over 36%) identify themselves as from the affected three-state region. Even two years after the storm, more than two-thirds of the writing being done on this event was authored by scholars not living or working in the affected region. Far from criticizing these ambitious and important efforts to understand the storm and the inequalities that it exacerbated, we hope to establish, to a modest extent, that the need for locally rooted perspectives was overlooked. The unique cultural climate of New Orleans, and how this culture was affected by the storm, is most evident to those who were part of the community and experienced these changes themselves. Outsider accounts, while valuable, may not explore locally rooted topics, experiences, or events that academics who personally experienced the storm may find worthy of research. Such writing may cover topics as diverse as the experience of applying for (and waiting hours in the baking sun to receive) emergency food stamp assistance or, alternatively, the experience of living in a militarized fortress city for weeks after the storm.
Largely left out of many early efforts to understand Katrina, local sociologists were in a particularly difficult situation. Working in a discipline that is expected to produce significant knowledge of the storm and its effects, while at the same time facing emotional upheaval, ongoing material struggles, the loss of our home city (at least as we knew it), and the daily reinstitution of a ‘new normal’ (Brayfield, 2006), many researchers discovered continuing tensions between their role as academic researcher and their role as hurricane victim/evacuee/displacee/returnee. Even once the funding barrier had been overcome, we faced continued and ongoing tensions between our desire and ability to produce research and our desire to understand and document our own lived experiences. In the remainder of this article, we document these obstacles and argue that sociological research and the disaster experience of the researcher must not be viewed as mutually exclusive.
Local Sociologists and Double Consciousness
Once local researchers returned home and began grappling with a new sense of normal, they were positioned to begin producing important research on Katrina. New Orleans’ scholars also began teaching about Hurricane Katrina, and courses such as the ‘Sociology of Disaster’ sprang up in local and regional universities (not to mention the incorporation of Katrina-specific insights and analyses into other courses, including Introduction to Sociology). Though we had to fit our empirical and theoretical contributions within the context and framework of research produced by others who had already defined the significance of Katrina, other challenges arose that severely limited our ability to contribute to this literature. We found (and still find) that our own experiences with the storm inform both the way we experienced talking to others about Katrina and the questions we asked during research.
Barber (2007: 81) argues that as an academic and a hurricane evacuee she was placed in a difficult situation. She says, I experienced a sort of role conflict [where] my unemotional academic self came into conflict with my highly emotional hurricane victim self, and it was difficult to simultaneously occupy each role. I was forced to separate myself from my recent identity as a New Orleans evacuee and instead evoke and make salient my role as graduate student, as [a] productive ‘masculine’ academic.
Though Barber’s experiences no doubt reflect role conflict, we argue that they also reflect a ‘double consciousness’, a similar concept but one more apt for understanding dynamics of power, privilege, and insider/outsider status. According to W.E.B. Du Bois, African Americans are forced to live with a double consciousness: black men and women must adopt a white perspective and see the world (and themselves) as whites do in order to survive in a world dominated by whites. At the same time they hold a more subjective black experience, one shaped through struggle and strife. Knowing which consciousness to adopt under which circumstances is crucial to survival in the face of Jim Crow laws and oppression. In Du Bois’ (1989 [1903]: 3) words, double consciousness ‘is a peculiar sensation … this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals.’
Local academics experience a very similar ‘twoness’. In order to survive and thrive in academia, and to share in the wealth and prestige therein, they have to know which identity to draw from in which situations. We often feel pressure to discuss and write about the storm in sanitized, analytic, and removed language. Any mention of more emotional, subjective feelings poses a threat to one’s perceived professional competence and is seen as unwanted editorializing. Barber (2007: 87–8) recounts that on a panel about personal experiences with Katrina, ‘it is difficult to do hurricane victim and academic at the same time … we were expected to simultaneously perform victim/survivor and academic, one role which is rooted in deep emotional and psychological trauma, the other which requires the disassociation from the emotional.’ While the concept of double consciousness suggests there are two identities that can be separated, these identities actually intersect since we will always be academics and disaster survivors. However, we might try to perform these identities singly under different circumstances. In order to perform both roles at the same time successfully (which Barber admits is difficult, if not impossible), local sociologists were required to see themselves through the eyes of other professional sociologists (who did not experience Katrina first-hand) and to constrain their discussions of the storm while also coming to terms with the loss of community, death, destruction, uncertainty and turmoil that experiencing Katrina entailed. The suppression of this latter consciousness, we argue, has two consequences. First, it is emotionally taxing, as it requires frequent assessments of audience and a careful choice of words; and second, it limits the types of knowledge that sociology can create about Hurricane Katrina.
The concept ‘double-consciousness’ is particularly apt and useful for capturing that we, as locals, were forced to shelve our deeply emotional selves if we hoped to succeed in our work. As academics, our colleagues, students, journal editors, and administrators expected us to create a particular type of discourse about Katrina, one rooted in empiricism and objectivity, and watered down in emotional and political commentary. However, as New Orleanians, our sadness, remorse, anger, contempt, helplessness, and confusion drove our empirical imaginations and motivated our need to understand the events leading up to Katrina. The subjectivity so inherent to experiences of strife is left out of our sociological understandings of disaster, and so we miss out on what many feminists and scholars of color see as an integral aspect of seeing the world: experience. According to Harding (1987: 9), ‘beliefs and behaviors of the researcher are part of the empirical evidence for (or against) the claims advanced in the results of the research.’ Further, by reconciling our subjective selves with expectations of objectivity, we might better understand the ways power operates during disaster. We can see how those in relatively advantaged and privileged positions (such as scholars not affected by Katrina) hold a disproportionate amount of power in shaping the way we understand disaster. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness is rooted in power; those who are disadvantaged (African Americans) need to view the world, talk about the world, and understand the world in ways similar to those in power if they hope to survive and prosper under oppression.
Although there is great overlap between the historical meaning of double consciousness and our own experiences, we do not claim our experiences with disaster are the same as those who experience racism. Double consciousness was originally crafted to capture the psychological effects of structural oppression as well as the necessary coping mechanisms for survival under oppression. As privileged white academics we will never experience the gravity of life-and-death decisions that black Americans have to make while simultaneously inhabiting two worlds. We do not argue that we are oppressed; rather, we use this concept to frame our experiences of dislocation, marginality, and powerlessness that accompany being academics and New Orleanians. At the same time, we feel two ‘unreconciled strivings’: one which is characterized by emotions; the other which requires detached objectivity. The earnest desire to work for a safe, livable, rebuilt New Orleans (and our anger at those preventing this from happening) often comes directly into conflict with the pressure to excel at our work and to gain and retain academic employment. As the sections below demonstrate, local sociologists had to write and speak about Katrina in ways that would be acceptable to journal editors, students, administrators, and colleagues, even if that meant suppressing our realities of disaster and altering what we really wished to say. To that extent, we continue to experience a double consciousness.
If local sociologists hope to produce knowledge valued by their profession, it means seeing Katrina and its aftermath from the perspective of an outsider and veiling our own personal experiences, anger, sadness, political agendas, or sense of community responsibility. What we, as local sociologists, really want to say about the disaster is wrapped up in our feelings of dislocation, and we know that this may jeopardize our intellectual reputations and harm our careers. Our subjective experience of the storm and occupational expectations of objectivity are not easily reconciled, and the related tensions that arise manifest themselves in three distinct venues: in our teaching, in our research, and in our collegial dealings.
Katrina as an Event Viewed from the Inside: Experiences in Academia
Teaching
The classroom is a venue in which a number of conflicts arise between our consciousness as professors/academics and that of hurricane evacuees/displacees. The principal conflict involves how to address the topic of Hurricane Katrina itself. Though there are multiple and conflicting definitions of what makes a good teacher, there are some commonly held beliefs that stand at odds with how we as New Orleanians and as academics would prefer to teach about Hurricane Katrina.
Teachers often hear the advice that we should present the facts on both sides of an issue and let students evaluate the facts and decide upon their own political commitments and views. According to Kincheloe (2008: 35), ‘students have been taught to believe that objectivity is an attainable virtue that should be practiced by everyone involved with education. They have never been exposed to the argument that education is never neutral and that when we attempt to remain neutral we fail to expose the political inscriptions of so-called neutrality. In the name of neutrality, therefore, students are taught to support the status quo.’ As yet another example, Bain’s (2004: 108) book What the Best College Teachers Do argues that the best faculty ask ‘students to play devil’s advocate and submit every argument they can imagine against the conclusions [the professor] draws in class’. Such advice encourages faculty to teach students as though their disciplines contain ‘a huge body of immutable facts’ (Bain, 2004: 53).
By the same means, a large body of pedagogical writing discourages teachers from imparting explicit (or implicit) political agendas upon their students. In his book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, David Horowitz (2006: xxiii-xxiv) argues that one of the things that makes a professor ‘dangerous’ is the ‘overt introduction of political agendas into the classroom’. In fact, he argues that any academic course or program that imbues students with ‘a partisan or ideological point of view’ is inappropriate for an academic curriculum. According to Horowitz: To merit their privileges – and specifically their tenure privileges – professors are expected to adhere to professional standards and avoid political attitudinizing. As professionals, their interpretations should be tempered by the understanding that all human knowledge is uncertain and only imperfectly grasped, that such knowledge must be based on the collection of evidence and evaluated according to professionally agreed upon methodologies and standards. As teachers they are expected to make their students aware of the controversies surrounding the evidence, including the significant challenges to their own interpretations. (Horowitz, 2006: xxvi, emphasis added).
It is telling that Horowitz specifically mentions tenure as what is at stake, given that failure to achieve tenure, at most institutions constitutes the termination of one’s employment and quite possibly one’s career. He argues that in order to merit keeping their jobs, faculty should avoid making any partisan political statements in the classroom. This thinking is not particularly novel, either. In 2003, Stanley Fish wrote a hotly debated article in the Chronicle of Higher Education contending that ‘it is immoral for academics or for academic institutions to proclaim moral views’. He continues that teachers ‘should not teach peace or war or freedom or obedience or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or antinationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk-show host. Of course they can and should teach about such topics – something very different from urging them as commitments.’
To the extent that Horowitz ties these ideas into the tenure process, the expectation that faculty take an objective, value-free position in their teaching is reflected in university policy manuals. The Penn State University faculty handbook decrees that: It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves … Hence, in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to have set forth justly, without super-cession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators. (Cited by Horowitz, 2006: xliv, emphasis added)
Yet how can academics who experienced Katrina be expected to present ‘both sides’ to a classroom in a ‘fair and judicial’ manner when this would entail discussing the successes (few as there were) of the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Bush administration? When some scholars (Giroux, 2006) and film-makers (Lee, 2006) have argued that the federal government adopted a policy of inaction with the conscious purpose of disposing of poor and black Americans, and our experiences on the ground in New Orleans confirm this callous disregard, how is it possible to present the issue to students fairly and judicially? Moreover, how could we submit counter-arguments to students that the recovery process has been carried out in an equitable fashion, or that we as Americans should consider whether it would be more economical to encourage New Orleanians to permanently relocate to higher ground, bulldozing poor neighborhoods to create green space? How could we present Hurricane Katrina merely as a learning exercise? Forgetting for a moment the personal pain and anguish that would be involved in listening to student arguments that the events following Hurricane Katrina did not embody racism and classism, or that better flood protection systems should not be funded and built, facilitating these sorts of discussions feels to us like committing new acts of violence against the people of the Gulf Coast. As teachers we recognize the importance of seeing an issue from multiple sides, and eliminating our own perspectives from discussions on Katrina restricts our ability to understanding more fully the consequences of the storm. Presenting this issue without incorporating our own viewpoint provides a personal challenge and pedagogical obstacle to us as New Orleanians (even though we have moved from the city).
This is only one of the paradoxes that we encounter in the classroom. The first author of this article often wants to tell students that the government failures after Katrina embody necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003) – or the result of conscious political decisions regarding who lives and who dies, decisions often made along race and class lines. Yet, books on classroom pedagogy discourage such dialogue, and doing so may very well threaten one’s job or tenure privileges.
In the years following Katrina, the first author found himself frequently teaching about Hurricane Katrina and just as frequently giving guest lectures about Katrina to colleagues’ classes. While he speaks about Katrina and inequalities, these lectures present empirical research and tackle several important examples, including how death rates varied by race (Sharkey, 2007) or how women were statistically more likely than men to lose their jobs following Katrina (Willinger, 2008) and to experience sexual assault before and after the storm (Jenkins and Phillips, 2008). While such empirical findings are important, they fail to capture the gravity of the Katrina experience, and are far less moving and interesting than the personalized experiences of a guest lecturer who could inspire human empathy over dispassionate analysis. He experienced the constant desire to bluntly say something like the following: The US government knowingly built a faulty flood protection system and consistently failed to fund routine maintenance, much less upgrades to that system, and has made little effort to fund rebuilding and infrastructural improvements. The government failed to dispatch resources even after it knew of the flooding and neglected to administer necessary aid because those affected were predominantly poor and black. That sort of callous neglect simply would not be allowed in a wealthy and white city. All of this took place in a political and economic context where Louisiana was continually ignored at the federal policy level. Initiatives to rebuild wetlands routinely failed in Congress, as well as efforts to improve the flood protection system, which were callously and criminally vetoed by George W. Bush. At the same time, Louisiana was denied the same level of oil and gas revenues for offshore drilling that other Gulf Coast states received – a state with as much oil wealth as Louisiana should not be the second poorest state – while residents lived in a chemical cesspool that gave them cancer at alarmingly high rates so that Americans could fill their cars with cheap gasoline.
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Despite the reality that these events are well documented, such a critical statement is seen by many as inappropriate for the classroom as it teaches students what to think, not how to think. Yet as scholars who witnessed at first hand the destruction, death, tragedy, and misery that followed Katrina, how is it possible to present Katrina as a social issue any differently to students? Our non-academic selves experience the uncertainty of evacuation and displacement, the smell of mold and rot, and the inundation of our city: how do we talk about ringing in the New Year among armed military police and sand-colored army vehicles? For us to do anything except encourage the rebuilding and redemption of the city in our teaching is akin to re-submerging the city we love.
In the end, keeping our statements on Hurricane Katrina empirically based achieves two ends. Primarily, it fits within the expectations that the academy places on teachers, one where teachers provide ‘facts’ and let the students make any and all moral decisions for themselves. Secondarily, it protects our own feelings of vulnerability, sadness, and anger. While it may be easy to discuss the relationship between access to stocks of social capital and a greater likelihood of finding a stable place to stay during displacement, it is much more difficult to maintain composure while describing the stench of rotting debris (food, sewage, animal and human remains), attempts to contact missing friends and acquaintances, the deaths of acquaintances (in the case of the first author), or seeing one’s favorite restaurants, landmarks, shops and neighborhoods flooded and boarded up.
We argue that teaching about the Katrina experience (from an insider/evacuee perspective) is much more in line with the positions of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy ‘names names as it focuses its attention on corporate power wielders … agents of Colonialism … and the promoters of specific types of race, class, gender, sexual, cultural and religious practices’ (Kincheloe, 2008: 35). Kincheloe (2008: 40) further contends that ‘teachers need to view their work in the context of living and working in a nation state with the most powerful military industrial complex in history.’ According to this perspective, particular ideas used to oppress groups of people must be ‘confronted and exposed for what they are – vicious lies’ (2008: 73). Some of these lies include: the notion that African Americans in New Orleans largely turned to crime and mayhem following the disaster, an idea rooted in largely discredited racial social science research (Muhammad, 2010); the popular argument that citizens are at fault for living below sea level; or the notion that the removal of the majority of New Orleans’ black population constitutes a step toward a more orderly, safe, and prosperous city. Kincheloe points out that a critical pedagogical approach questions hyper-rationalization, or the ‘application of reason alone to analyses of the world in lieu of emotion, affect, and concerns of worth and justice’ (Kincheloe, 2008: 34). Perhaps one of the unique things sociology scholars have to offer in the classroom is the theoretically constituted perspective (Habermas, 1990), which allows us to break from contextual constraints and instead recognize and value subjectivity and reflection. We are not arguing that scholars should get caught up in a dialectical debate over universality and intersubjectivity, but rather, as Bernstein (1996) argues, reconcile substantiality with subjectivity. In doing so, we teach students to see and think about the world in a new (critical) way – one that they may not obtain from their families, friends, or the mainstream media. Personal experiences filtered through a sociological perspective are crucial and can engage students with the real lived effects of disaster as well as the statistics.
Research and Writing
Although our double consciousness induces particular struggles when teaching, many of the struggles we experience relating to research and to the creation of sociological work are particularly problematic. This is because ignoring our own experiences instead of propelling them into research may make anemic our understanding of the workings of power and inequality during disaster. While some local scholars have dug their heels into the continuing trials and tribulations of their neighbors post-storm, we claim that double consciousness makes it difficult to produce research in a way that is simultaneously ‘true’ to social science expectations and ‘true’ to our experiences. As local scholars, we face a chasm between how we want to write about and research Hurricane Katrina and how our academic discipline demands that we do so. According to Sprague (2005: 20), scholarly reports rely ‘on narrowly specialized language, stay at a high level of abstraction, hide the personhood of the researcher, and favor a dispassionate and often passive voice’. She adds that This emotional flatness not only helps to hide the researcher in the text, it creates emotional distance in the reader, too. The audience is supposed ‘to think and not feel’. The scholarly norm that discredits speakers who show feelings like caring, anger, or outrage within the context of scholarly communication distances the reader from caring about the situation under discussion, much less feeling compelled to do something about it. (Sprague, 2005: 23)
Concerned about this tendency, several graduate student colleagues teamed up soon after the storm to craft an article documenting our experiences and framing those experiences with sociological theory and concepts, eventually published in the Journal of Public Management and Social Policy (Barber et al., 2007). This article tells the stories of six local sociologists, in a first-person format; each of us used the sociological concepts and ideas that best framed our experiences to tell our stories of evacuation, displacement, and return home. The first author (of the present article), for example, used Bourdieu’s habitus and Weber’s understanding of bureaucracies to analyze the post-Katrina aid-disbursement processes (which he experienced first-hand while applying for disaster food stamps), while the second author used Hochschild’s The Managed Heart to frame her evacuation and displacement experiences.
Despite our own positions as local New Orleanians and as hurricane displacees, convincing reviewers of the worth of this article presented a challenge. One reviewer’s comments were particularly telling. These included: ‘What biases of the recorder/listener might be at work in these accounts?’ In the language of the social sciences, our experiences with Katrina did not provide special insights into the inequalities generated by the storm. Instead, they made us biased and presumably blurred our ability to see the empirical truth. Paradoxically, scholars who experienced the storm had somehow become less qualified to speak about its effects than those studying it from outside of New Orleans. We argue that this reaction stems from two complementary processes.
First, the language of scientific sociology contains little terminology or framework for privileging experience as a means of knowing (see Harding, 2004). As Smith (2004: 24) points out, ‘The ethic of objectivity and the methods used in its practice are concerned primarily with the separation of the knower from what he knows and in particular with the separation of what is known from any interests, “biases”, etc., which he may have which are not the interests and concerns authorized by his discipline.’ Sociologists are trained to use the language of ‘bias’ to depict anyone’s personal involvement in the things that they study, rather than recognizing the unique perspectives that experience can generate. In our case, we suspect that the reviewer was less concerned about bias (in the sense of inaccurate observations or interpretations), but felt uncomfortable with the first-hand depictions that parted from typical ways of doing science.
Second, using the term ‘bias’ allowed the reviewer to utilize the widely accepted standards of the social science community to voice that discomfort. Within the positivist and empiricist branches of sociology, this stance makes sense. According to Burt and Code (1995: 31), advocates of this position believe that ‘if a phenomenon such as Syndrome X is “real” it will show up. Any researcher/inquirer who is appropriately placed and who follows the approved methods of research will discover precisely the same facts as any other equally scrupulous investigator.’ From this perspective, the personal experiences of local sociologists provide no special insights into the storm and its aftermath because the facts are empirically verifiable and any researcher, even one who did not experience the storm, could presumably write the same article given the same methodological strategies – in other words, experience cannot enhance one’s perspective, but has the potential to distract or confound. This view works to systematically exclude the perspectives of academics who experienced Hurricane Katrina first-hand. As Smith (1990: 32) points out, ‘to disclose the interests and perspectives of sociological knowers does not as such invalidate a knowledge that is grounded in actualities. Showing that people are interested is insufficient as a reason for saying that what they claim to know is biased by their interest and therefore invalid as knowledge’, though this is often assumed to be the case within the discipline. Since we are all socially, geographically, and historically located (and therefore all have ‘biases’), it is fascinating that this reviewer did not also ask what biases might be at play among those who write about Katrina without first-hand experience. Learning about the storm through the media or other second-hand avenues also shapes the type of knowledge that an individual can create, but the avenues by which non-local researchers learn about the event are not cast as a strong source of ‘bias’.
Qualitative work on the experiences and perspectives of others is completely accepted within sociology, as long as it is framed as personal, though socially shaped, experiences of the world, not as ‘truths’. The question is: why can we not apply the same principle to our own individual experiences? Experiences are usually shaped by larger structures of race, class, gender, and so on during a particular time and in a specific place. In Weeber’s (2006) account of serving on a Southern Sociological Society panel, ‘Sociological Stories of Hurricane Katrina’, he says that the emotionally charged descriptions of scholars’ personal experiences with disaster elicited a strong reaction from the audience: ‘I have never witnessed such an attentive audience, some crying while we spoke.’ These stories did not lack sociological significance (reflecting larger patterns), but it was the emotionality of them that touched people. Such statements reveal that emotionality does not have to distract scholars from important sociological analyses, but can instead complement analysis while motivating human empathy and inspiring action.
We also argue that Katrina presented a unique opportunity for researchers to accumulate grant money, publications, and professional prestige. Knowledge and power are intimately related, not only in the sense that knowledge is powerful but also in the sense that power allows one to create knowledge and informs the knowledge that is created. Systematically excluding the voices of a particular group of people who had more legitimate claims to knowledge 5 (by virtue of experiencing the event) can be seen from this perspective as a power-play, maintaining proprietorship over an exciting new area of inquiry that promised significant career rewards. Before Katrina, disaster research was typically undertaken by a core group of stalwart disaster researchers. By contrast, many of the sociologists who lived and worked in New Orleans were not ‘disaster scholars’ until after Katrina washed ashore in 2005. Although the double-blind peer review process makes unpacking this dynamic difficult, it is plausible that the event created a power play between established (but non-local) disaster researchers and local (but non-established in the disaster field) researchers. Here we benefit from Foucault’s (1979) conception of power, whereby disciplinary power functions within ‘machines’ (like disciplines or universities) for production, and transforms subjects into their own guardians – making the exercise of physical power unnecessary. The end result is homogeneity and conformity (1979: 183, 201). According to Foucault, if one believes that he/she is being monitored and could be sanctioned, that person will act accordingly, even if such surveillance are not occurring. While we cannot see the forces at play in evaluating our work (or the vested interests of those individuals), knowing that these dynamics are likely at work makes us wonder if we must eliminate subjectivities from our writing if we hope to see it in print.
Though one of us has published and is currently writing several traditional academic articles on Katrina using unique survey data, we recognize and understand that valuable understandings can also be gained from admittedly subjective writing and research that takes a position of conscious partiality. One place in which this is accomplished is Hidalgo and Barber’s (2007) Narrating the Storm; they wanted to create a safe space where scholars could tell their stories of disaster while doing what sociologists do best – talking about the significance of the events they experienced. Here, academics from New Orleans and the greater Gulf Coast talk about how racism played out at a gas station post-Katrina, the politics involved in touring the Lower Ninth Ward, tensions in volunteer work, and experiencing the blasé or attitudes of indifference while in exile. One contributor even frames the workings of privilege during evacuation by telling the story of eating a hotdog and drinking a beer while watching the storm on television. These stories are first-person and accessible, and they highlight the unique experiences of academics during and after Katrina. However, they all show how individual experiences were impacted by larger structures, a key objective of sociology dating back to C. Wright Mills (2000 [1960]). Such academic work gives value to the experience of our double consciousness, where we are encouraged to be both academics and disaster displacees.
Despite this book’s importance, the editors struggled to find an academic publisher for it. Although no publishers admitted that the first-hand, narrative format made the book less appealing, some stated that they planned to publish only one Katrina book and that book was already in process – again indicating that local scholars who began later were disadvantaged. Other publishers, despite positive reviews, opted not to publish the book for unknown reasons. This result parallels ‘passive racism’ which leaves lingering uncertainty over whether the disadvantage experienced had to do with race or with something else – it is impossible to tell whether the incorporation of first-hand experiences into the writing ultimately made that work less publishable. (It was eventually published in 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
Fussell (2008) argues that local scholars find themselves much more connected to the historical and cultural particularities that embody New Orleans, and we add that this connection to local history and culture is something that helps us bridge the gap between the academic and the local. Yet when the first author constructed an article with two coauthors, using original survey data, that analyzed race, class, and neighborhood differences from evacuation to return, many of the reviewer comments attempted to detach the empirical analyses from the historical context. Though the original article began by documenting how two neighborhoods evolved unequally through time, one reviewer asked: ‘How exactly is the historical information relevant?’ The editor agreed, and we were forced to jettison most of the historical framework. Such a request required that we sever the inequalities that occurred during and after Katrina from their historical precedents. Yet New Orleanians are painfully aware that Katrina exposed race and class tensions that existed for many decades and were well known to residents (see Landphair, 1999). Even so, our argument that these inequalities cannot be understood apart from the unique history and geography of New Orleans’ neighborhoods ultimately lost out.
After we submitted the revised draft of the article, the journal’s editor commented that the article’s conclusion ‘assumes a somewhat moralizing tone that while surely relevant, may not be the most appropriate’. Comments such as this demonstrate the wide chasm between the discipline’s demands for detached objectivity and the need for those scholars who experienced the storm to ensure that some positive changes are created by our scholarship. This paradox places us, as researchers, in an untenable position. Having spoken to New Orleanians during our data collection, many agreed to participate in the study out of a hope that the research findings would attract attention and funding to the people and infrastructure of New Orleans; in short, they placed high hopes upon our research. How could we strip the article of its ‘moralizing’ and political content while reaffirming the hopes of participants who have suffered so greatly? Though this is a concern that surely all Katrina researchers face, it was exacerbated for local scholars who witnessed first-hand the flooding, pain, misery, and slow rebuilding process and who felt a personal sense of commitment and responsibility to the people of New Orleans. 6 Marks (2008: 15) argues that ‘in the early days immediately following the storm, a disaster of this magnitude does not call for dispassionate analysis, but rather human empathy’. As New Orleanians and as sociologists, we believe that dispassionate analysis does injustice to those affected by Katrina and that the gravity of the event demands passionate, results-oriented (and often emotional) discourse and analysis. Further, we contend that instead of focusing on uncovering the ‘truth’, research should explicitly take different theoretical and epistemological positions (critical race; feminist; rational choice) in order to arrive at many situated understandings of the disaster and its aftermath, not simply one objective report of the facts.
Finally, we suggest that Katrina provides evidence that dispassionate analysis, couched in a positivist intellectual tradition, sets the stage for future disasters by promoting inaction. According to Mitchell (2006), the outcome of Hurricane Katrina is not just a vast physical and political mess with profound human consequences; it is also a direct challenge to the assumption that scientific knowledge promotes sound public policy. Almost nothing about the apparent failures of societal response comes as much of a surprise to seasoned hazards researchers. Well before this event, the research community had developed many of the methods and tools for addressing them.
Despite a large body of empirical knowledge about New Orleans’ geographic vulnerability (Colten, 2002), coupled with knowledge about methods for averting disaster, no public outcry emerged before the catastrophic flooding. Nor was the existing body of empirical research findings enough to force the hand of a government and a political economic system that exhibited active disdain for poor and non-white cities and people (Giroux, 2006).
Professional and Departmental Interactions
In addition to the difficulty our double consciousness poses for teaching and research, it is also worth briefly mentioning our interpersonal experiences with colleagues. Since many faculty and graduate students affected by Hurricane Katrina made the ‘choice’ to move elsewhere, we often find ourselves as the token Katrina ‘victim’ in our new departments. At times, this means being singled out in public or in semi-public situations to provide the insight of a Katrina survivor. Often, we receive impromptu questions such as, ‘So, what was that like?’ or ‘Tell us about your work in New Orleans.’ Similar to how a teacher might single out an African American student to provide a mostly white class with the ‘black perspective’, we found that as token Katrina ‘victims’, others rely on us to give the ‘Katrina survivor’ perspective. Though these situations provide excellent opportunities for consciousness raising, they also elicit discomfort for two reasons and thus actually fail to capture the lived experience of Katrina.
First, as academics our experiences of Katrina were shaped by privilege; many of us had the financial capital and social networks necessary to evacuate early and to relocate permanently. Like the African American student called on to give the black perspective, we do not feel comfortable speaking for all New Orleanians; particularly because we have more advantages than many New Orleanians and were able to shield ourselves from many of the life-threatening situations (though not the emotional turmoil) that Katrina entailed. Indeed, when the second author spoke to people in her hometown about Katrina, they often reminded her that she was ‘lucky’ and that ‘others have it worse’ (Barber, 2007: 85). Paradoxically, we are called upon to provide the Katrina perspective, but are often reminded that we are unable to do so given our class privilege. This creates substantial discomfort because we are aware that we cannot possibly speak for all New Orleanians, particularly those different from ourselves. In attempting to do so, we know that these differences may be highlighted by others, pointing out our class privilege and discrediting the perspectives and views that we do bring to bear.
Second, many who ask us these questions presumably desire only a short sound bite. But, summing up such a cataclysmic, life altering event in only a couple of sentences is a daunting task; how can one say something profound on such short notice when so much happened? As the token Katrina evacuees in our departments, this happens to us quite frequently. The first author frequently becomes tongue-tied and offers little in the way of informed analysis, feeling as if he is leaving listeners wondering how someone who lived through Hurricane Katrina and who researches Hurricane Katrina could possibly have so little to say about it. This is consistent with the writing of Marks (2008: 14), who says, ‘it was clear to me that words, no matter how descriptive or genuinely expressed, were not sufficient to “tell the story”. They were like a small two-dimensional photograph or post-card of the Grand Canyon which can never convey the majesty and full ambiance of that place.’ We find that the combination of being expected to produce knowledge on the spot, along with the overwhelming emotions that Katrina evokes, results in either nothing at all or alternatively in a watered down interpretation of events.
The second author experienced such requests several times as a teaching assistant, and each time she declined to comment. Professors usually asked her in class if she had ‘anything to add’ on the topic of Katrina, to which she would simply shake her head and reply, ‘Nope.’ Refraining from speaking up made her feel guilty; she could have taken these opportunities to make clear to students that there are continuing problems in both New Orleans and along the greater Gulf Coast. However, impromptu questions do not provide ample opportunity to discuss the ways race and class played out in and impacted the social disaster following the winds. Further, acting as an advocate in this scenario means personalizing the storm and may accompany displays of emotion that are deemed unprofessional. How would students react if their teaching assistant or professor cried? Both authors remember the awkward silence and horrified facial expressions of scholars who witnessed a colleague cry while he presented his research on the environmental impact of Katrina on the city of New Orleans. For the second author, her gender makes her feel especially uneasy discussing personal topics in the classroom. Students often see their male professors as objective providers of truth and women professors as working with a hidden agenda (Kimmel and Ferber, 2003). They also see women as scorned and overly emotional, and so their teaching may not be taken as seriously or their anecdotes as examples of larger trends. While both men and women who experience disaster are likely to experience deep-seated pain (as we show in this article), the ways the disaster experience intersects with gender stereotypes make it especially difficult for women to reconcile their double consciousness within an academic environment.
Conclusion
The richest understandings of Hurricane Katrina’s consequences may come from those who both experienced it first-hand and who have the theoretical and methodological training to frame those experiences. Yet, the demands that academia places on local sociologists create a double consciousness, giving rise to a paradoxical situation: one in which scholars struggle to reconcile their subjective experiences of disaster with the objective expectations of being a scholar. In short, being a Katrina evacuee/displacee in academia often means either sacrificing the objectivity necessary to do ‘good’ research or emptying our work of our lived experience. Living through disaster makes the destruction seem more severe, the political neglect more criminal, the recovery more prolonged, and the gravity of the situation more pronounced. Writing that fails to capture these elements, in our view as New Orleans academics, not only falls short of capturing a complete understanding of the events that transpired, but cannot provide as powerful a call to action as writing from the lived perspective. This of course assumes an ability to write intelligibly about one’s experiences (something that not everyone who experiences a disaster possesses), and so there are limits to deploying the subjective experiences of researchers. However, a sociological education provides substantial training in writing and reasoning that should help local sociologists to create new insights drawn from experience but grounded in the sociological perspective.
This article discusses some of the struggles that we, as New Orleanians and as academics, faced in the days, weeks, months, and years after Hurricane Katrina. Borrowing from Du Bois, we document how we continue to live with a double consciousness; one worldview intended for the classroom and office, and another more subjective worldview largely kept silent. We discuss the difficulties we face in reconciling professional expectations with our subjective experiences of disaster while teaching, doing research, and interacting with colleagues. We argue that this double consciousness comes at a cost to the discipline since much of the knowledge to be gained from trained sociologists who experienced the storm is never created. Our academic endeavors with Hurricane Katrina suggest that sociology as a discipline still does not privilege experience as a legitimate way of knowing, despite the presence of the theoretical and methodological tools provided by scholars and thinkers such as Dorothy Smith and C.W. Mills, whose ideas have been with us for decades. If sociology has not fully embraced experience as a means of knowing, the implications span far beyond Hurricane Katrina and limit the types of knowledge that can be created about race, gender, class, sexualities, immigration, political oppression, as well as other social, environmental, and technological disasters.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank Kirsten Dellinger, Bruce Ravelli, and Joey Sprague for comments on earlier versions of this article. We also thank the editors for their careful reading of our paper and their useful suggestions.