Contemplating Katrina’s Chaos
Focused on evacuees, scholars urge multifaceted response to their plight.
By Ronald Roach
To get some notion of how deeply scholars have been affected by Hurricane Katrina, you might look to someone like Dr. Erma Lawson, a medical sociologist from the University of North Texas. Lawson, who has been coordinating the assistance efforts for the Association of Black Sociologists, hasn’t hesitated to call on colleagues, graduate students, civil rights organizations, churches and local public officials to respond to the plight of the people displaced by floodwaters.
And that’s not all. In addition to this semester’s load of sociology classes, Lawson is using other talents to help evacuees. “I’m trained as a nurse,” she explains. “I initially responded to the crisis by volunteering as a nurse in the shelters.”
There’s no doubt that humanitarian concern motivates scholars like Lawson. But Katrina’s Category 4 winds also appear to have blown academics out of their comfortable ivory towers and into the public fray. The hurricane is even influencing the way scholars do research.
“I’m working with a team of graduate students to publish a paper on the coping responses of evacuees,” Lawson says of her experiences nursing and counseling people in shelters.
