The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which covered nearly thirty thousand square miles across seven states, was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history. Due to the speed of new media and the slow progress of the flood, this was the first environmental disaster to be experienced on a mass scale. As it moved from north to south down an environmentally and technologically altered valley, inundating plantations and displacing more than half a million people, the flood provoked an intense and lasting cultural response. The Flood Year 1927 draws from newspapers, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, vaudeville, blues songs, poetry, and fiction to show how this event took on public meanings. Americans at first seemed united in what Herbert Hoover called a "great relief machine," but deep rifts soon arose. Southerners, pointing to faulty federal levee design, decried the attack of Yankee water. The condition of African American evacuees in "concentration camps" prompted pundits like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells to warn of the return of slavery to Dixie. And environmentalists like Gifford Pinchot called the flood "the most colossal blunder in civilized history." Susan Scott Parrish examines how these and other key figures--from entertainers Will Rogers, Miller & Lyles, and Bessie Smith to authors Sterling Brown, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright--shaped public awareness and collective memory of the event. The crises of this period that usually dominate historical accounts are war and financial collapse, but The Flood Year 1927 enables us to assess how mediated environmental disasters became central to modern consciousness.

The 1970s were a decade of historic American energy crises-major interruptions in oil supplies from the Middle East, the country's most dangerous nuclear accident, and chronic shortages of natural gas. In Energy Crises, Jay Hakes brings his expertise in energy and presidential history to bear on the questions of why these crises occurred, how different choices might have prevented or ameliorated them, and what they have meant for the half-century since-and likely the half-century ahead. Hakes deftly intertwines the domestic and international aspects of the long-misunderstood fuel shortages that still affect our lives today. This approach, drawing on previously unavailable and inaccessible records, affords an insider's view of decision-making by three U.S. presidents, the influence of their sometimes-combative aides, and their often tortuous relations with the rulers of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Hakes skillfully dissects inept federal attempts to regulate oil prices and allocation, but also identifies the decade's more positive legacies-from the nation's first massive commitment to the development of alternative energy sources other than nuclear power, to the initial movement toward a less polluting, more efficient energy economy. The 1970s brought about a tectonic shift in the world of energy. Tracing these consequences to their origins in policy and practice, Hakes makes their lessons available at a critical moment-as the nation faces the challenge of climate change resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.

In this synthetic, interdisciplinary work, Neil Brenner develops a new interpretation of the transformation of statehood under contemporary globalizing capitalism. Whereas most analysts of the emergent, post-Westphalian world order have focused on supranational and national institutional realignments, New State Spaces shows that strategic subnational spaces, such as cities and city-regions, represent essential arenas in which states are being transformed. Brenner traces the transformation of urban governance in western Europe during the last four decades and, on this basis, argues that inherited geographies of state power are being fundamentally rescaled. Through a combination of theory construction, historical analysis and cross-national case studies of urban policy change, New State Spaces provides an innovative analysis of the new formations of state power that are currently emerging.

Tankers account for the largest number of firefighter crash deaths of all types of fire department vehicles. This report examines the various causal factors that have been identified as problematic for tankers and their drivers.

* Major disasters increased over 93 per cent during the 1990s, reaching 712 in 2001 * Up to 340 million people are affected by disasters every year* 'Vulnerability' is the key to understanding the causes, impacts and ways to mitigate disasters In this penetrating analysis, the authors critically examine "vulnerability" as a concept that is vital to the way we understand the impact and magnitude of disasters. This book is a counterbalance to technocratic approaches that limit themselves to simply looking at natural phenomena. Through the notion of vulnerability, the authors stress the importance of social processes and human-environmental interactions as causal agents in the making of disasters. They critically examine what renders communities unsafe, a condition they argue that depends primarily on the relative position of advantage or disadvantage that a particular group occupies within a society's social order. Bolstering their theoretical analysis with case studies drawn from Asia, Africa and Latin America, the authors also look at vulnerability in terms of its relationship to development and through its impact on policy and peoples' lives.

This two-volume work examines the causes of civil war and consequent humanitarian emergencies in developing countries. Twenty-three international experts explain why wars start and how to prevent them--offering a less costly alternative to the present reactive strategy of the world community to provide mediation, relief, and rehabilitation after the conflict occurs. The volumes provide a general framework which is applied to such recent conflicts as those in Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, the Congo, Afghanistan, and the Caucasus.

This volume sheds light on the complex linkages between tourism, disaster and conflict. In many countries, tourism crises have been precipitated by natural disasters. At the same time, the tourism industry has often been assigned a pivotal role in the reconstruction and recovery efforts. Prospective tourists have been lured into supporting post-disaster rehabilitation simply through visiting disaster-affected areas. Yet, prioritising the tourism sector in the recovery process may have unintended consequences: less touristic areas that have been severely affected by the disaster may receive less humanitarian relief support. Disaster recovery processes in the tourism industry can also be highly uneven, as multinational hotel chains tend to recover more swiftly and increase both their market share and their control over important resources. Politically well-connected tourist operators and wealthy local elites tend to exploit distorted recovery governance mechanisms and take advantage of the legal and institutional uncertainties triggered by disasters. Insecure, customary land rights of ethnic minority groups and indigenous people may be particularly prone to exploitation by opportunistic tourist operators in the aftermath of a disaster. When disasters strike settings of pre-existing conflict, they may exacerbate the situation by increasing competition over scarce resources and relief funds, or they may catalyse conflict resolution following an intolerable excess of additional suffering among fighting parties. Tourism ventures may offer post-conflict livelihood opportunities, but potentially trigger new conflicts. Disasters may instigate a morbid "dark tourism" industry that invites visitors to enter spaces of death and suffering at memorials, graves, museums, and sites of atrocity.

With contributions from a range of expert voices within the field, this book explores the use of art therapy as a response to traumatic events. Offering rare insight into ways in which art therapists have responded to recent crises, this is a unique resource for art therapists looking to coordinate interventions for large-scale disaster and resulting trauma. Chapters address a range of environmental and manmade disasters around the world, including hurricanes, typhoons, wildfires, mass shootings and forced migration, highlighting the impact of an art therapy approach in dealing with widespread trauma. Covering both community and individual cases, it provides an in-depth view into the challenges of working in these settings, including the effects on the therapist themselves, and offers practical information on how to coordinate, fund and maintain responses in these environments. The first book to focus on disaster response in art therapy, this will be an invaluable contribution to the field in an increasingly vital area.

Earthquakes are a huge global threat. In thirty-six countries, severe seismic risks threaten populations and their increasingly interdependent systems of transportation, communication, energy, and finance. In this important book, Louise Comfort provides an unprecedented examination of how twelve communities in nine countries responded to destructive earthquakes between 1999 and 2015. And many of the book's lessons can also be applied to other large-scale risks. The Dynamics of Risk sets the global problem of seismic risk in the framework of complex adaptive systems to explore how the consequences of such events ripple across jurisdictions, communities, and organizations in complex societies, triggering unexpected alliances but also exposing social, economic, and legal gaps. The book assesses how the networks of organizations involved in response and recovery adapted and acted collectively after the twelve earthquakes it examines. It describes how advances in information technology enabled some communities to anticipate seismic risk better and to manage response and recovery operations more effectively, decreasing losses. Finally, the book shows why investing substantively in global information infrastructure would create shared awareness of seismic risk and make postdisaster relief more effective and less expensive. The result is a landmark study of how to improve the way we prepare for and respond to earthquakes and other disasters in our ever-more-complex world.

At 5:41 p.m. May 22, 2011, the deadliest single tornado to hit the United States in 50 years tore its way through Joplin, Missouri. By the time it completed its murderous course, 160 lives were lost, and those who survived have stories they can tell for the rest of their lives. Two veteran southwest Missouri reporters, Randy Turner and John Hacker, share some of those stories in 5:41. The book features photos taken by Hacker within moments of the deadly tornado and details about some of the horrific moments that came to symbolize May 22, 2011, in Joplin, Missouri. The book includes the following: -First person stories of the horrors of the tornado -Photographs taken moments after 5:41 -The obituaries of those who died May 22 or later from injuries received in the tornado -Details from three hospitals that served the community well, including one that was hit by the tornado -The nightmarish experiences of those who had just graduated from Joplin High School moments before the tornado destroyed the building. -The outpouring of volunteering that made Joplin stand for hope in the days after May 22. -The complete text of the Joplin Tornado Memorial Service held at Missouri Southern State University, including the speeches by President Barack Obama, Gov. Jay Nixon, and Rev. Aaron Brown -The final National Weather Service report -The heroes who gave their lives to save others This book offers a revealing look at the day that changed Joplin, Missouri, forever.

Why do we have the constant feeling that disaster is looming? Beyond the images of atomic apocalypse that have haunted us for decades, we are dazzled now by an array of possible catastrophe scenarios: climate change, financial crises, environmental disasters, technological meltdowns-perennial subjects of literature, film, popular culture, and political debate. Is this preoccupation with catastrophe questionable alarmism or complacent passivity? Or are there certain truths that can be revealed only in apocalypse? In The Future as Catastrophe, Eva Horn offers a novel critique of the modern fascination with disaster, which she treats as a symptom of our relationship to the future. Analyzing the catastrophic imaginary from its cultural and historical roots in Romanticism and the figure of the Last Man, through the narratives of climatic cataclysm and the Cold War's apocalyptic sublime, to the contemporary popularity of disaster fiction and end-of-the-world blockbusters, Horn argues that apocalypse always haunts the modern idea of a future that can be anticipated and planned. Considering works by Lord Byron, J. G. Ballard, and Cormac McCarthy and films such as 12 Monkeys and Minority Report alongside scientific scenarios and political metaphors, she analyzes catastrophic thought experiments and the question of survival, the choices legitimized by imagined states of exception, and the contradictions inherent in preventative measures taken in the name of technical safety or political security. What makes today's obsession different from previous epochs' is the sense of a "catastrophe without event," a stealthily creeping process of disintegration. Ultimately, Horn argues, imagined catastrophes offer us intellectual tools that can render a future shadowed with apocalyptic possibilities affectively, epistemologically, and politically accessible.

Recent years have witnessed considerable speculation about the potential of open data to bring about wide-scale transformation. The bulk of existing evidence about the impact of open data, however, focuses on high-income countries. Much less is known about open data’s role and value in low- and middle-income countries, and more generally about its possible contributions to economic and social development. Open Data for Developing Economies features in-depth case studies on how open data is having an impact across the developing world-from an agriculture initiative in Colombia to data-driven healthcare projects in Uganda and South Africa to crisis response in Nepal. The analysis built on these case studies aims to create actionable intelligence regarding: (a) the conditions under which open data is most (and least) effective in development, presented in the form of a Periodic Table of Open Data; (b) strategies to maximize the positive contributions of open data to development; and (c) the means for limiting open data’s harms on developing countries.

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION * A New York Times New & Noteworthy Book * A CBC Best Nonfiction Book of 2020 * A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book for 2020 "Combining his poetic sensibilities and storytelling skills with a documentarian's eye, [Heighton] has created a wrenching narrative."-2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury In the fall of 2015, Steven Heighton made an overnight decision to travel to the frontlines of the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and enlist as a volunteer. He arrived on the isle of Lesvos with a duffel bag and a dubious grasp of Greek, his mother's native tongue, and worked on the landing beaches and in OXY--a jerrybuilt, ad hoc transit camp providing simple meals, dry clothes, and a brief rest to refugees after their crossing from Turkey. In a town deserted by the tourists that had been its lifeblood, Heighton--alongside the exhausted locals and under-equipped international aid workers--found himself thrown into emergency roles for which he was woefully unqualified. From the brief reprieves of volunteer-refugee soccer matches to the riots of Camp Moria, Reaching Mithymna is a firsthand account of the crisis and an engaged exploration of the borders that divide us and the ties that bind.

On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, are still suffering the effects. "Life Exposed" is the first book to comprehensively examine the vexed political, scientific, and social circumstances that followed the disaster. Tracing the story from an initial lack of disclosure to post-Soviet democratizing attempts to compensate sufferers, Adriana Petryna uses anthropological tools to take us into a world whose social realities are far more immediate and stark than those described by policymakers and scientists. She asks: What happens to politics when state officials fail to inform their fellow citizens of real threats to life? What are the moral and political consequences of remedies available in the wake of technological disasters?

Through extensive research in state institutions, clinics, laboratories, and with affected families and workers of the so-called Zone, Petryna illustrates how the event and its aftermath have not only shaped the course of an independent nation but have made health a negotiated realm of entitlement. She tracks the emergence of a "biological citizenship" in which assaults on health become the coinage through which sufferers stake claims for biomedical resources, social equity, and human rights. "Life Exposed" provides an anthropological framework for understanding the politics of emergent democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and everyday forms of survival as they are interwoven with the profound changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Focusing on the region of the Arab world--comprising some two hundred million people and twenty-one sovereign states extending from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf--this book develops a theory of social change that demystifies the setbacks this region has experienced on the road to transformation. Professor Sharabi pinpoints economic, political, social, and cultural changes in the last century that led the Arab world, as well as other developing countries, not to modernity but to neopatriarchy--a modernized form of patriarchy. He shows how authentic change was blocked and distorted forms and practices subsequently came to dominate all aspects of social existence and activity--among them militant religious fundamentalism, an ideology symptomatic of neopatriarchal culture. Presenting itself as the only valid option, Muslim fundamentalism now confronts the elements calling for secularism and democracy in a bitter battle whose outcome is likely to determine the future of the Arab world as well as that of other Muslim societies in Africa and Asia.

Meltdown investigates and recreates the dramatic events behind the most notorious nuclear accidents in history, as well as those shrouded in secrecy. Combining human tragedy with intriguing science, each account reveals new aspects of humanity's complex relationship with nuclear power and the ongoing struggle to harness and control it. From the pioneers of Los Alamos who got up close and personal with the cores of atomic bombs, to the hapless engineers in Soviet fuel-processing plants who unwittingly mixed up a disaster in a bucket, and from the terrifying impact of a tsunami at Fukushima to the mystery of the recent Russian incident, Meltdown explores the past and future of this extraordinary and potentially lethal source of infinite power.

Big data, surveillance, crisis management. Three largely different and richly researched fields, however, the interplay amongst these three domains is rarely addressed. Through unique international case studies this book examines the links between these three fields. Considering crisis management as an 'umbrella term' that covers a number of crises and ways of managing them, this book explores the collection of 'big data' by governmental crisis organisations, as well as the unintended consequences of using such data. In particular, through the lens of surveillance, the contributions investigate how the use and abuse of big data can easily lead to monitoring and controlling the behaviour of people affected by crises. Readers will understand that big data in crisis management must be examined as a political process, involving questions of power and transparency. A highly topical volume, Big Data, Surveillance and Crisis Management will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields including Sociology and Surveillance Studies, Disaster and Crisis Management, Media Studies, Governmentality, Organisation Theory and Information Society Studies.

In law, as elsewhere, the ordinary is overshadowed in the popular and academic literature by the dramatic and sensational. While the role and behavior of lawyers in the operation of our criminal justice system has been closely scrutinized, comparatively little research has been devoted to the manner in which lawyers litigate the day-to-day civil (non-criminal) cases that comprise the vast bulk of the workload in state and federal courts. Originally commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice, this is the first comprehensive national study of the U.S. civil justice system. Kritzer analyzes 1600 cases involving 1400 attorneys in five federal judicial districts. Examining the background, experiences, day-to-day activities, and outlook of civil lawyers, Kritzer finds that the work of lawyers combines the roles of the professional and the broker in many aeas of ordinary litigation. Arguing that lawyers' behavior must be understood in part as a form of brokerage between the client and the legal system, he suggests that the roles of professionals and brokers be considered as complements rather than alternatives in the justice system, and concludes by recommending that lawyers' monopoly on advocacy in civil litigation be restricted. An engaging, lucidly written study, The Justice Broker will be of special interest to practicing lawyers and legal scholars.

This book is a classic study of a disease which had a profound impact on the history of Tudor and Stuart England. Plague was both a personal affliction and a social calamity, regularly decimating urban populations. Slack vividly describes the stresses which plague imposed on individuals, families, and whole communities, and the ways in which people tried to explain, control, and come to terms with it.