The Impact of Corporeal Markers on Natural Hazard Preparedness During Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

Natural hazards disrupt society but become disastrous due to social inequality perpetuated through daily systems of oppression. This paper aims to focus on how corporeal markers of race and disability inhibited an individual’s ability to prepare, specifically, evacuate before the 2005 Hurricane Katrina’s impact in New Orleans. Using relational analysis, I seek to meet the following objectives: (1) to make connections between everyday social inequality due to deviant corporeal markers and pre-Katrina evacuation processes and (2) to highlight the implications of further studying corporeal markers in other fields of academia. This paper adds to corporeal markers literature and connects this concept to natural hazards literature by discussing social inequality and vulnerability during natural hazards. I hypothesized that people who were marked as being of a minority racial group and having a disability were more likely to have difficulty evacuating from New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, leading to increased vulnerability to disastrous outcomes following the hurricane. The findings within the literature proved to be consistent with my hypothesis. The implications of this paper could be applied to emergency management, geography, and sociology. They encourage professionals in each field to use corporeal markers to be critical, promote equity in practice and theory, and work to dismantle everyday systems of oppression to help prevent natural hazard events from becoming disasters.