In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The principal Vietnamese-American enclave was a remote, low-income area that flooded badly. Many residents arrived decades earlier as refugees from the Vietnam War and were marginally fluent in English. Yet, despite these poor odds of success, the Vietnamese made a surprisingly strong comeback in the wake of the flood. In Weathering Katrina, public health scholar Mark VanLandingham analyzes their path to recovery, and examines the extent to which culture helped them cope during this crisis. Contrasting his longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews of Vietnamese residents with the work of other research teams, VanLandingham finds that on the principal measures of disaster recovery—housing stability, economic stability, health, and social adaptation—the Vietnamese community fared better than other communities. By Katrina’s one-year anniversary, almost 90 percent of the Vietnamese had returned to their neighborhood, higher than the rate of return for either blacks or whites. They also showed much lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than other groups. And by the second year after the flood, the employment rate for the Vietnamese had returned to its pre-Katrina level. While some commentators initially attributed this resilience to fairly simple explanations such as strong leadership or to a set of vague cultural strengths characteristic of the Vietnamese and other “model minorities”, VanLandingham shows that in fact it was a broad set of factors that fostered their rapid recovery. Many of these factors had little to do with culture. First, these immigrants were highly selected—those who settled in New Orleans enjoyed higher human capital than those who stayed in Vietnam. Also, as a small, tightly knit community, the New Orleans Vietnamese could efficiently pass on information about job leads, business prospects, and other opportunities to one another. Finally, they had access to a number of special programs that were intended to facilitate recovery among immigrants, and enjoyed a positive social image both in New Orleans and across the U.S., which motivated many people and charities to offer the community additional resources. But culture—which VanLandingham is careful to define and delimit—was important, too. A shared history of overcoming previous challenges—and a powerful set of narratives that describe these successes; a shared set of perspectives or frames for interpreting events; and a shared sense of symbolic boundaries that distinguish them from broader society are important elements of culture that provided the Vietnamese with some strong advantages in the post-Katrina environment. By carefully defining and disentangling the elements that enabled the swift recovery of the Vietnamese in New Orleans, Weathering Katrina enriches our understanding of this understudied immigrant community and of why some groups fare better than others after a major catastrophe like Katrina.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana and Mississippi. The storm devastated the region and its citizens. But its devastation did not reach across racial and class lines equally. In an original combination of research and advocacy, Hurricane Katrina: America s Unnatural Disaster questions the efficacy of the national and global responses to Katrina s central victims, African Americans. This collection of polemical essays explores the extent to which African Americans and others were, and are, disproportionately affected by the natural and manmade forces that caused Hurricane Katrina. Such an engaged study of this tragic event forces us to acknowledge that the ways in which we view our history and life have serious ramifications on modern human relations, public policy, and quality of life.

Unexplained weather has been terrorizing the world for a few months. When MI6 agent Nicholas Wellington and some colleagues are killed in a ship wreck, Nicholas’s girlfriend Charmaine Dorbandt, a fellow MI6 employee decides to investigate and prove her theory of unexplained weather, but will the world governments listen to her? French Air Force Medic, Pierre Marceline is recovering from a helicopter accident that nearly cost him his life. Pierre receives a call from DGSE where he is asked to help a blind MI6 agent on a classified mission. Pierre decides to help and his adventure begins. When Charmaine and Pierre meet, they start to work with a group of scientists to see if they can stop the worsening weather. During their investigation, Charmaine decides to investigate each person, but along the way, Charmaine and Pierre must learn to work together with physical obstacles from Charmaine’s blindness and Pierre’s healing body, and the emotional scars that Charmaine has from Nicholas’s untimely death and the trauma from Pierre’s accident. Will they be able to weather the physical and emotional storms that keep coming up, while they are trying to save the world from disaster?

How does science fiction imagine forms of life that are plausible, and yet different from anything that we already know? Fluid Futures is about how science fiction imagines an open future. Science fiction does not claim to predict what will actually happen in times to come. But it offers pictures of potential developments; it narrates the unfolding of possibilities for change that are already implicit, or incipient, in the present moment. As Rod Serling said, science fiction is “the improbable made possible.” The book starts by looking at three tools that are commonly used in science fiction to address futurity: extrapolation, speculation, and fabulation. It goes on to consider concrete examples of how science fiction texts employ these tools to illustrate ways in which the future might be different from – but not entirely discontinuous with – the present-day conditions with which we are familiar. Fluid Futures insists upon the aboutness of science fiction, as it depicts situations and ideas that are at once possible and difficult to grasp. The book then explores how the genre embraces fictionality and narrative, reconceives time, and projects images of possible worlds. The point of the book is not to give a theory of science fiction. Instead, it emphasizes the ways that science fiction texts themselves propose theories, leading readers to reconceive concepts that we have taken for granted.

In a book as illuminating as it is captivating, Thomas E. Drabek presents an in-depth analysis of the emotional impacts of disaster events and the many ripple effects that follow. Through the technique of storytelling, a series of nine fictional stories where characters experience actual disasters of different types throughout the United States illustrate the vulnerabilities and resilience to enhance the readers understanding of disaster consequences. Designed for classroom use, each story is followed by an "Analysis" section wherein discussion and research paper topics are recommended. These highlight links to published research findings. A "References" section details citations for all works included. Brief commentary in a "Notes" section adds further connections to other disasters and relevant research studies. The Sociology of Disaster is an important innovation in disaster education and will become an invaluable resource within universities and colleges that offer degrees in emergency management at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

This handbook presents a timely and comprehensive overview of theory, data, methods and research findings that connect human population dynamics and environmental context. It presents regional summaries of empirical findings on migration and environmental connections and summarizes environmental impacts of migration – such as urbanization and deforestation. It also offers background on the health implications of environmental conditions such as climate change, natural disasters, scarcity of natural resources, as well as on resource scarcity and fertility, gender considerations in population and environment, and the connections between population size, growth, composition and carbon emissions. This handbook helps readers to better understand the complexities within population-environment connections, in addition to some of the opportunities and challenges within environmental demography. As such this collection is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and policy analysts in the areas of demography, migration, fertility, health and mortality, as well as environmental, global and development studies.

Are we inside the era of disasters or are we merely inundated by mediated accounts of events categorized as catastrophic? America's Disaster Culture offers answers to this question and a critical theory surrounding the culture of “natural” disasters in American consumerism, literature, media, film, and popular culture. In a hyper-mediated global culture, disaster events reach us with great speed and minute detail, and Americans begin forming, interpreting, and historicizing catastrophes simultaneously with fellow citizens and people worldwide. America's Disaster Culture is not policy, management, or relief oriented. It offers an analytical framework for the cultural production and representation of disasters, catastrophes, and apocalypses in American culture. It focuses on filling a need for critical analysis centered upon the omnipresence of real and imagined disasters, epidemics, and apocalypses in American culture. However, it also observes events, such as the Dust Bowl, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11, that are re-framed and re-historicized as “natural” disasters by contemporary media and pop culture. Therefore, America's Disaster Culture theorizes the very parameters of classifying any event as a “natural” disaster, addresses the biases involved in a catastrophic event's public narrative, and analyzes American culture's consumption of a disastrous event. Looking toward the future, what are the hypothetical and actual threats to disaster culture? Or, are we oblivious that we are currently living in a post-apocalyptic landscape?