Home - Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Narrating the Storm: Sociological Stories of Hurricane Katrina
Editor: Danielle A. Hidalgo and Kristen Barber
Date Of Publication: Sep 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3200-7
Isbn: 1-4438-3200-6
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 blasé, 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.

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.

“Before we are done with it, hundreds of books and thousands of articles will be written about that set of events we have come to call Katrina. But none of them will be anything like this remarkable collection of memoirs. The authors gathered here all know how to spin a tale and how to do so with a rich sociological sensibility. But, far more to the point, they all have gripping stories to tell.”

– Kai Erikson, author of A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters

“. . . Narrating the Storm is must reading for anyone interested in the Hurricane Katrina disaster and its aftermath. Emotionally evocative, riveting at times, this engaging collection of original essays is replete with sociological insight. The book is an important contribution, as well, to the genre of storytelling sociology.”

– Ronald J. Berger, author of Storytelling Sociology: Narrative as Social Inquiry

“The stories told by these individuals provide compelling applications and examples of sociological concepts and theories that serve to stimulate our sociological imaginations. Narrating the Storm is an important contribution to society’s efforts to better understand this latest American tragedy unleashed by Katrina.”

– Duane A. Gill, editor of Voices of Katrina, the Journal of Public Management and Social Policy

“The authors . . . give us thoughtful, personal, often emotional narratives as well as clear analytical insight on a wide range of issues . . . Narrating the Storm humanizes the disaster with its honest stories and aptly uses theoretical tools to place the stories in a larger sociological context. This is a unique and engaging book.”

– Alice Fothergill, author of Heads Above Water: Gender, Class, and Family in the Grand Forks Flood

Price Uk Gbp: 24.99
Price Us Usd: 39.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

We recommend

Language and Literature
Middle-earth and Beyond: Essays on the World of J. R. R. Tolkien

History
Arctic Discourses

Education
The Supportive School: Wellbeing and the Young Adolescent

Interesting reviews

From Navigating Music and Sound Education

“We rarely have the opportunity and time to engage with the practicalities of music teaching through the lens of evidence-based practice. This book provides us with a wonderful exception that is accessible to beginning and established teachers. It contains a wide range of stimulating and thought-provoking material that draws on real-world experiences and events, which are contextualised, informed and structured by theory. This is a powerful combination that we can visit again and again for insight and inspiration. Congratulations to all involved, particularly the editors for shaping such a valuable contribution!”
—Professor Graham F. Welch, University of London; President, International Society of Music Education

“Navigating music and sound education draws together a range of issues increasingly acknowledged to be at the basis of reflective and effective music learning and teaching: social settings, cultural dimensions, gender, indigeneity, varying cognitive approaches, inter-disciplinary connections, technology, types of learning, and creativity. It opens up areas of pedagogy that go beyond classroom methodology to acknowledge student individuality and encourage music learning and teaching grounded in the reality of students’ musical and social lives. It will be invaluable for those training to become educators and for teachers already in the field.”
—Associate Professor Peter Dunbar-Hall, University of Sydney

“This book brings an important contribution to music teacher education as it challenges the readers to rethink their paradigms of music education. It highlights the importance of preparing a reflective teacher, autonomous, creative and conscious of the multifaceted and multicultural locus in which they will work. The book also draws on the importance for music teachers to consider the context in which they work, and establish a dialog between local musical traditions, informal music practices and global trends of music teaching and learning. Most importantly, all chapters are in one way or another derived from research carried out on specific areas, thus stressing the importance of the research informed practice in music education.”
—Professor Liane Hentschke, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; International Society of Music Education Immediate Past President

Many readers will appreciate Steve Dillon and Kathy Hirche’s description of the future of education in their work with dynamic technological contexts.

Navigating Music and Sound Education is a wonderful guide and resource for pre-service music teachers, for teachers in the field, and for teacher educators.

It offers a range of fresh perspectives on the state of music education as it is and as it might be. Kari K Veblen

Navigating Music and Sound Education is an ambitious project which features current research from 20 individuals whose professional identities run the gamut from musician to songwriter to student to educator to music therapist to ethnomusicologist. The book’s scope is perhaps the most exciting aspect of Navigating Music and Sound Education.
Kari K Veblen
University of Western Ontario
British Journal of Music Education
October 2011