For those interested in learning more about the personal impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, Narrating the Storm serves as an essential read. This important and timeless volume is a compilation of sixteen narratives that address the experiences of Gulf Coast residents, faculty, and graduate students who were caught up in the largest (not so) natural disaster in United States history. Each contributor deploys storytelling sociology as a methodological approach in order to illustrate how personal experiences with disaster are not so personal, but rather reflect and are informed by larger social phenomena related to issues including race, class, gender, age, bureaucracy, risk, collective memory, the blase, and more. The narratives in this volume exemplify how inequality and injustice are unveiled, exacerbated, and created by the occurrence of disaster; and reveal the sociological in everyday and not-so-everyday experiences.
About the Author: Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo received her Ph.D. from University of California, Santa Barbara. She completed three years of graduate study at Tulane University in New Orleans. Working for the Southern Sociological Society's Annual Conference in New Orleans, she co-organized a Silent Auction for the SSS Katrina Fund, Gulf Coast Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and the ASA Minority Scholarship Fund. Additionally, she organized a panel session that directly led to this book project. Her areas of interest include gender, sexuality, the sociology of the body, immigration, Asian and Asian American studies, the sociology of development, and Southeast Asia with a particular emphasis in Thailand. She is co-editor, with Carl L. Bankston III, of Immigration in U.S. History: An Encyclopedia survey of U.S. Immigration (Salem Press 2006) and has authored or co-authored numerous journal articles and book chapters. Kristen Barber is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her areas of interests include gender inequality, work & occupations, sociology of the body, and qualitative research methods. She is currently studying the effects men's increasing participation in the beauty industry has on the organization and experience of labor amongst women beauty works. Other projects include the impact virtual spaces have on ethnographic research and the subjective experiences of sociologists who experienced Hurricane Katrina (forthcoming in Critical Sociology). She is author or co-author of several journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, and she has received paper awards from the Mid-South Sociological Association and the Pacific Sociological Society. Barber earned her Masters in Sociology from Tulane University in New Orleans, where she lived before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.