Environmental Sociology
Study Guide
TEST COVERS
Bell, Michael, Introduction to the Environment 2nd
Alice Fothergill, Heads Above Water Ch.1 – 6 Overview p. 18
NOTES on Fothergill: Heads Above Water,
1. Introduction: Red River Rising
2. Disaster Strikes
3. Women's Roles
4. Financial Fallout
5. The Stigma of Charity
6. Threats to Mind and Body
Alice Fothergill assumes that readers are familiar with many sociological concepts. Perhaps this isn’t a fair
assumption. Here are some concepts we’ll review on Wednesday. Which can you define?
Gendered lens p. 13
Downward mobility p. 12
Social construction of
gender p.15 Para:3
Public, private and
community spheres of
social life p.10
What is self? P.15 para
1
Master status p.15 para 2
“The self is the thinking, feeling being that links various roles and identities
that people put forth” as situations change. A flood, loss of home, challenge
this basic sense of self. Who ARE you away from your friends, job, home,
activities?
“Gender scholars have shown that gender is an achieved identity [i.e., you
learn gender roles from your family and society) and that being a woman is
…a ‘master status’ meaning that one characteristic of an individual becomes
that person’s identity. ….Gender theorists believe that gender is one of the
most significant categories of identity in our society. In other words, it is a
major focus of how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves.”
Chapter 2 - Fothergill
Overview p. 18-19
Disasters in context. P 25-26
Gendered lens p22
Women as helpers. Helpers can’t help. Helpers need help.
Men as heroes. Heroes can’t save. Heroes need saving.
Aspects of disaster
Trauma p. 23
Stress p. 23
Collective stress
situations 26
Blame p.23-24
Why does it matter that trauma was individual and collective?
Age as a part of identity. What ages experienced the most suicide?
“Collective stress situations reveal aspects of the social system that are not
visible during the ‘less stressful conditions of everyday life.’” 26
Under what conditions do communities pull together? When does blame
game dominate?
Disasters as sites of
learning
What do we learn about how communities are built when we study a
community facing a significant disaster?
How does a disaster
expose and impact preexisting social
inequalities? 27
“Disaster researchers have fully accepted disasters as social phenomena, not
‘natural’ ones. Indeed, the fundamental notions of the current disaster
paradigm are that disasters are inherently social phenomena and have their
foundation in the social system or social structure.” In other words, disasters
are social and political events linked to who we are, how we live, and how
we structure and maintain our society.”27
“Disasters do not affect everyone in the same way, as they are not equal
opportunity events. Indeed, disasters disproportionately affect more
marginalized groups, such as the poor, people of color and women.
…Disasters reveal power in intimate relationships.”
p. 26
Differential
vulnerability
Disasters are social not
natural
2
Fothergill Ch 3 . Women’s roles.
You may be asked to explain how disasters affect men and women differently. How do the
differences in their social roles become accentuated in a community disaster?
35: Question: In disasters do women maintain their traditional gender roles
(‘role carryover’) or are traditional roles suspended? Do non-traditional, more egalitarian relationships
revert to traditional roles? Disaster scholars disagree.
36: Women in Grand Forks negotiated traditional and non-traditional roles in flood.
Affected all aspects of life – home, work, community.
DEF: “Social roles are most often defined as the behavior attached to a status or position, such as mother,
but also may be conceptualized as a set of relations between a social person and a social circle ‘involving
negotiated duties and personal rights.’” (lopata;1994:4).
Women found “taking on new roles and shedding established ones was a significant aspect of what the
disaster meant to them.” 36 “Obligations and expectations of each role produced some role expansion,
role strain and role conflict.”
Community roles: “Important and meaningful.” 41
Sandbagging: “IF you were not out sandbagging, you were not a member of our society.”
Some perceived as masculine environment, all perceived work as highly satisfying.
Food prep: More traditionally feminine role. Also clothing dist.
Women stereotyped as ‘emotional support givers.’ Who do “emotional labor.”
Traditional roles but now in public setting…”more visible, recognized and less isolating”
than home roles.39 Help neighbors: sharing, more interaction than before flood.
Role conflict –between 3 demanding roles: 40
“Men with children were the most likely to participate in public activities, while women with children
were the least likely to help outside the house.” (Women mind children, husband sandbags).
Grand Forks Herald: “’This flood allows guys to be guys like guys have never been before.’”
“Women did not abandon any …roles but attempted to negotiate all three simultaneously.” 48
Family role:
Child care (only 495 of 4000 day care slots remained).
Even when ideology is egalitarian (sharing child care) women do more of it. 43
Flood prep and clean-up: “Women took the threat more seriously and engaged in more preparation
activities in the home….due to social location: women have less control over their lives, have less power
in the world, and therefore must take risks more seriously than men do.”43
Shared tasks – two person jobs – boarding windows.
Egalitarian – cleaning the basement.. Men pitched in until they had to return to work. 45
“After the basements…, women and men returned to their gendered domains.” 45
“As other research on disasters has found, women clean up at home, while men work on more visible
town projects in the public sphere.” 46 (isolating after first team work)
Women serve as link to community resources/services 46. BUT
3
“Lisa had to use her identity as someone’s wife to pull any weight in the public sphere” (to get plumber).
47 (???Is market place public sphere????)
Work roles
“For some women…, the disaster provided an opportunity to take on leadership roles in the community
that would have been unattainable prior to the flood.” EX; “Esther’s work…gave her the confidence to
resist the ‘good old boys’ who wanted her to step down after the flood.” 49
“Most reported that returning to work had positive consequences.” 49-50.
“Many women [and men –cr] find work to be less stressful and less difficult than the pressures and
demands of home life.” 50 Disaster impact on home life: disaster cleaning, and rebuilding plus usual.
BUT “difficult to return to work when there was no reliable daycare.” 51
House guests (evacuees) and extended family helped. Most experienced “role accumulation” not just
conflict. They juggled successfully. Stress but not stress alone. “Accompanying these multidimensional
life spaces can resulting individual enrichment, autonomy, independence, psychological well-being,
master,….strong sense of self and self worth.” 52
4
Fothergill Chapter 4
Financial Fallout
“Middle class people who go through catastrophic losses have feelings of failure, loss of control, and
social disorientation, and they must deal not only with t he financial hardship but with the psychological,
social and practical consequences.” 54
54:”The way the women and their families experienced poverty was a result of living in a consumer
culture, which espouses values that people’s worth can be measured by possessions.”
57: Given destruction of some neighborhoods, some families moved to a more affluent area “Where they
felt that the didn’t belong or the people were not as friendly, were experiencing some social isolation and
a loss of their community…..they often felt socially isolated and like outsiders in their new
neighborhoods.”
58: “it was difficult for the teenagers to adjust to the lower standard of living and to be unable to buy the
clothes and accessories that they had been accustomed to.”
62 Coping skills; “Many women in the lower class and working class were more accustomed to
struggling materially and having less power in their everyday lives, …coping skills useful in getting
through the disaster. Because they had less of a sense of entitlement, they coped better with the losses.”
65 For first time women found themselves in “contentious financial disputes” with city, FEMA, various
agencies, churches and local government. ..”The women showed resolve, determination, anger and
strength, non of which are typical ‘North Dakota nice.’ ….Women are socialized to avoid conflict and
placate volatile situations, yet many women describe feeling so angry that they reached their breaking
point.”
69: Changed opportunity, changed role. “The disaster…sent some women into roles of social activism
and civic involvement in the public sphere.”
73: Conclusion:
“Many believe that natural disasters are the true status leveler, in that the disasters hity indiscriminately,
affecting all walks of life, both rich and poor alike. By contrast, most research has shown that disasters
are discriminating and that the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society are hit the hardest
and have the hardest time recovering. Popular culture, however, still perpetuates the status leveling
viewpoint.”
78”Higher status and resources enable disaster survivors to feel comfortable navigating the bureaucracies
after the disaster, arm them with a sense of entitlement, and assure them a near-total financial recovery.
The data showed that social and economic class were significant factors—even more significant than
gender—in the process of receiving disaster assistance and resources. “
Fothergill, Chapter Five Stigma of Charity
Goffman: three kinds of stigma
81: “abominations of the body; blemishes of individual character; and tribal sigma of race, nation,
religion”
Management of stigma…
5
Fothergill, Chapter Six, Threats to Body and Mind
(105-135)
PHYSICAL HEALTH
 Flood took its toll physically. 105
 “Food, weight and body image were important issues for women in the flood just as they are
in non-disaster times.” 106 Weight gain more common than loss. 108
 The ideology (world view) “that women’s thinness is equated with their worth and value—is
so widespread and pervasive that gaining weight affects women’s self-worth and self-esteem,
even in the midst of a natural disaster.” 108
 Issues: exercise 109; sleep 110; Alcohol 117; Domestic violence 117/Ch. 8; Exposure to
contamination/mold 118-9. Particular challenges for those with disabilities 111=112
 Women missed Grand Forks pre-flood street safety. There was a loss of privacy affected some
people’s well being particularly lesbians and other non-traditional families. 114-115
 Double violation, first flood and then looters 128 “I felt like the house had been
violated…raped.”
EMOTIONAL HEALTH
 Depression, 120-121, 125; stress-anxiety 123; feelings of being taken advantage of 122; panic
123.
 Lack of mental focus 124; powerlessness 129; Loss 132;
 Counselling seen as not part of Norwegian culture…just cope..126;
 Post-traumatic stress disorder: 131
“The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory which breaks
spontaneously into consciousness both as flashbacks during waking states and traumatic
nightmares.” Herman 1992
Supports
 Journals
 Some felt empowered by survival. 132-3
 Social connections and work settings helped some women feel in control. 134
Gendering of experience:
“The women’s experiences with their health and well-being were gendered.” 134 By this, Fothergill
means that women’s health experiences are marked as definitively women’s --- “experiencing weight gain
and a lack of exercises as a threat to body image and self-esteem; feeling unsafe in their homes and
experiencing the flood as a violation of the body due to the climate of violence against women; being
responsible for their children’s health (and suffering miscarriages) among contaminants and black mold,
defending their female mayor {NB: Men were more critical of mayor: women were more critical of city
hall in general but respected job mayor had done} and searching for social connection amidst the loss.”
134-5
Women felt both vulnerable and strong for surviving.
6