Harvey in Houston A Buddhist teacher and scholar reflects on the devastating storm in her hometown (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
We use a co-auto-ethnographic study of Hurricane Harvey where both authors were citizen responders and disaster researchers. In practice, large-scale disaster helps temporarily foster an ideal of community which is then appropriated by emergency management institutions. The advancement of disaster research must look to more radical perspectives on human response in disaster and what this means for the formation of communities and society itself. It is the collective task as those invested in the management of crises to defer to the potentials of publics, rather than disdain and appropriate them. We present this work in the advancement of more empirically informed mitigation of societal ills that produce major causes of disaster. Our work presents a departure from the more traditional disaster work into a critical and theoretical realm using novel research methods.
Flooded City: Affects of (Slow) Catastrophe in Post-Harvey Houston
Current Anthropology, 2022
Within 24 months (2015-2017), Houston was struck by three "500-year flood" events, including Hurricane Harvey, the largest rainfall event in US history. In this article we explore how this wave of catastrophic flooding has impacted Houstonians' emotional and epistemic attachments to their homes, neighborhoods, and city. In dialogue with the anthropology and science and technology studies literature on disasters and its focus on technopolitical regimes of disaster anticipation and risk mitigation, we offer an analysis of the "affective publics of slow catastrophe" that have emerged in Houston in response to a situation that experts and citizens alike fear represents a "new normal" in the context of climate change. We focus on three affective orientations around which floodies are clustering: diluvial individualism (a wounded retreat from public engagement in favor of highly individualized recovery strategies), hydraulic citizenship (an activist political subjectivity oriented around creating better infrastructures of water management), and amphibious acceptance (an emergent affective orientation oriented to learning to live with rather than against floodwater). Although we ultimately argue that amphibious acceptance's time has not yet come in Houston, our fieldwork suggests that the repetitive experience of catastrophic flooding is changing the affective presence of water in Houston.
Hurricane Harvey: Human barriers to remembering, environmental repercussions of forgetting
International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2018
The death toll would have been higher if not for citizen volunteers who used their own boats to rescue people trapped by the flood (Mann & Salamon, 2017). Survivors were emotionally traumatized (Plohetsi, Ball, & Taboada, 2017) and approximately 47,000 left homeless (Espinosa & Muhammad, 2017). Incredibly, some of downtown Houston was spared, including the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies where I am a faculty member. Once the institute leaders determined that the faculty and trainees were safe, it was decided to start classes as scheduled on September 8. Many of us were in a mental fog during a somber meeting that day. We learned that our administrator lost a close friend to drowning. A faculty member was rescued from the second story of his home after the first story flooded. Others experienced the total or partial destruction of homes. Some clinicians were volunteering in refugee centers. By the third week of classes, the acute mental fog was lifting, but the losses and difficulties continued. For example, one trainee's family could not afford to leave their home, so they lived upstairs without a kitchen because the first story was gutted. Although Harvey was not the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, it was an environmental disaster. Ecological crises will persist for years due to oil, chemical, and sewer spills and the destruction of water treatment facilities (Bajak & Minkoff, 2017; Haurwitz, 2017). Mold grew in buildings that were invaded by floodwaters full of dirt, chemicals, and sewage. Throughout the area were piles of rotting debris left by the storm and clean-up efforts (Mann & Salamon, 2017). In addition to compromised groundwater, there was increased air pollution. As plant and refinery workers hurriedly burned off compounds that might combust, nearby residents experienced headaches, nausea, and itchiness (Bajak & Minkoff, 2017). Damage estimates made Harvey the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history (Swartz, 2017), and small towns with fewer resources faced particular challenges in rebuilding (Chang, 2017; Schwartz, 2017; Walsh, 2017b). This presentation will examine the environmental crisis, its antecedents, and aftermath from various theoretical viewpoints, topics historically neglected in psychoanalysis.
Reflections of the Storm: Emerging Hope
2007
As the nation marked the one-year anniversary of hurricane Katrina, the clean-up work continues. This narrative recounts personal experiences of members of the Sacred Heart University faculty who accompanied a student delegation as they joined the many volunteers in Gulfport, Mississippi. The interdisciplinary group included faculty from Nursing, Psychology, Education, Media Studies, Campus Ministry, and university administration. The goal of the group was to participate in manual labor while providing emotional support for those hardest hit by the storm. The results had a profound effect on each member ofthe team, as each developed a sense of gratitude, a true understanding of the importance of neighbors helping neighbors, and experienced hope.