Interpreting Catastrophe: An Examination of Houston's Many Voices in the Aftermath of Hurricane Harvey

Abstract

For more than four decades now, social scientists have understood disasters as temporally prolonged processes in which human practices enhance the socially disruptive and materially destructive capacities of geophysical phenomena, technological “accidents,” and epidemics. This approach has come to be known as vulnerability theory in the realm of disaster risk management and it is closely related to the political-ecological analytical approach in the social sciences. Because of the analytical power of vulnerability theory and political ecology, some social scientists have gone so far as to call disasters “revelatory crises” that illuminate the political economic conditions that give catastrophes their form and magnitude. Although vulnerability theory and political ecology are certainly powerful analytical vantage points, they are not necessarily the perspectives through which the various social actors interpellated by catastrophes interpret calamity. This article explores the question “what does Hurricane Harvey reveal for whom?” in Houston Texas, and examines the implications the various responses to this question on the part of Houstonians of various socio-economic backgrounds and political positioning have for disaster risk reduction in the U.S. Gulf Coast.