SGER: Agency Within Disaster Preparedness and Response: The Role of Poverty and Disability

University Of North Texas, Denton TX

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract: Traditionally, disaster research has assumed that people can make their own decisions about whether to prepare for natural disasters or to evacuate when warned that a disaster is impending. The ability to decide is known as agency. This project will help to understand how people make preparedness and evacuation choices when their choices are constrained by poverty. Traditionally, we assume that those who fail to prepare are irrational; this assumption perpetuates a fallacy of agency, which assumes that people purposefully make decisions that make them more or less vulnerable. How does this image change when the idea of agency is removed from the model? If some groups have no agency whether through poverty, disability, mental illness or circumstance to take protective measures or choose evacuation locations, how can and should emergency management respond? The project focuses on collecting event histories from families evacuated from New Orleans with the goal of understanding agency. The goal is to quickly begin collecting these histories in order to have as accurate as possibly memories of not only the event, but also the period leading up to the event. The project is expected to have major implications in evacuation modeling in disasters, particularly where those models assume choices that people may not have. A multidisciplinary team will work with graduate and undergraduates to conduct this research, thereby drawing new people and perspectives into disaster research while addressing this question