INTRODUCTION

Superstorm Sandy

Ethnographic discovery goes beyond the “sum of parts” of data collection and design. The researcher, who is the ethnographic instrument, must also adapt to unforeseeable developments that arise in the field. This entails continually making judgments regarding pursuing new paths of inquiry and observation. Discovery is the process and product of the ethnographer’s intuition and insight. The incremental sharpening of insight equips the ethnographer to stitch together and keep alive the stories of communities.

—Sancha Doxilly Medwinter, the author

Twelve days after Superstorm Sandy’s landfall on October 29, 2012, I arrived in New York City from North Carolina with a truckload of donated supplies from a food and clothing drive that I, my husband, and my two daughters organized for those impacted by the disaster. From our living room, we had watched with millions of television viewers media coverage of the plight of disaster survivors. I thought even more about the possible plight of the many Black and brown faces of New Yorkers who we knew existed, but whose stories the news did not feature.

Prior to moving to North Carolina for graduate school, I lived in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from one of the colleges of the city’s public university system. Like many other Caribbean immigrants who are part of the city’s salad bowl, I felt a sense of obligation to return to New York City and respond in some way. My family and I decided we needed to do something to help the disaster survivors. I sent out requests through my university department’s listserv, while my girls, who were eleven and twelve years old at the time, created flyers with a list of needed donations and posted them on bulletin boards, doorways, and our apartment leasing office. I contacted a local radio station, which solicited their listeners for donations. My husband, who worked with a moving company at the time, put in a request for his employers to donate the use of a twenty-five-foot truck to transport disaster relief supplies. Within a few days, we had received enough donations to fill the truck that he would drive to New York City.

Prior to arriving in New York City, I wondered about the extent of the plight of these disaster survivors. I also knew that folks like Pastor Errance (pseudonyms are used for the names of all the clergy, staff, volunteers, and survivors mentioned in the book) would be on the front lines and that I would find my place wherever they needed me. I contacted Pastor Errance, whom I had known for years because of his mobile, bullhorn ministry that combined the gospel with disseminating immigration information to immigrant communities in Brooklyn. As expected, Pastor Errance had shifted his focus to bringing disaster relief to the same communities he regularly served. I asked him to take me to the communities that were impacted but had not received assistance. We went to Canarsie, a neighborhood in Brooklyn with a significant Black Caribbean and African presence.

We arrived at a street corner in Canarsie and opened up the back of the truck. Almost immediately survivors poured out onto the streets and surrounded the back of the truck. We began to disburse food, blankets, coats, and baby items. I also began my first set of interviews with Canarsie survivors who agreed to speak with me. Pastor Errance would later lead me to a local community-based organization in Canarsie where we donated the remaining clothing. Although Pastor Errance and other pastors were engaged in disaster response efforts, they did not have a large enough vehicle or a large enough space to store the supplies. In speaking with the volunteers, I also learned about the disaster response run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which was set up in a large Catholic church on the other end of Canarsie. I was able to observe and interview disaster responders working at this site. The FEMA-run disaster response center also provided an opportunity to observe and interview disaster survivors.

In my conversations with Pastors Errance and Ward and Bishop Fabian, all Black West-Indian church leaders and now disaster responders, I also learned from them that The Rockaways was one of the hardest hit areas. They also talked about the difficulty of getting to The Rockaways since the storm had created an impasse. I wanted to see if that was still the case, and so the next day I asked a friend of mine to drive me to The Rockaways. Right before Sandy, she worked as a certified nursing assistant at one of the nursing homes lining the beach that was evacuated due to flooding. Public transportation had not yet fully resumed, and it was also during the winter months. I would subsequently have to make the trek on my own, which meant that keeping warm was always an important consideration. Our first visit to the peninsula consisted of driving around to survey the devastation and identify areas that were most visibly impacted by the disaster.

When I had decided to set out for New York City, my initial plan was to create a short video ethnography of less visible communities, which I would also circulate to disaster response organizations. I had envisioned conducting about thirty conversational interviews, in areas that we knew had been hit but had not received media coverage. This initial plan morphed into a much larger project of longer duration.

Over the course of my research, I interviewed a groundswell of 120 participants: disaster responders from FEMA, New York City, and New York State; nonlocal nongovernmental organizations; and local nonprofits, churches, and community-based organizations. I observed hundreds of disaster survivors and disaster responders in a variety of settings. Authoring this book allows me to present a synthesis of what I learned from those who are involved in the on-the-ground execution of disaster response. I also hope the book finds its way into the hands of undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in disasters and the reproduction of race and class inequality. Last but in no way least, I hope this book will reach the public, especially New Yorkers for whom I expect it will hold special significance.

Book Overview

In Ecologies of Inequity, I tell the story of how the economically deprived urban disaster survivors—a mixture of Black, Latino, Native American, White ethnic, new immigrant, public housing resident, homeless, and precariously housed—fared alongside their relatively more economically privileged homeowner neighbors. The story describes and explains the serial displacements of the service-dependent, chronically economically deprived by Sandy and the disaster logics of disaster response organizations. I also tell the story of how Black immigrant disaster survivors—undocumented, basement renters, working class, retired, and informally employed—fared alongside their Black middle-class homeowner neighbors in Canarsie. The story describes and explains Black immigrants’ delayed assistance and hardships navigating the labyrinth of organization-mediated disaster assistance. The setting of this story is New York City, in the Canarsie disaster response area of Brooklyn and the Eastville (pseudonym) and Westville (pseudonym) disaster response areas in of The Rockaways (see figure 1).

Disaster is an uncanny catalyst to observe in microscopic detail both the unraveling and reconstituting of features of urban environments and the uneven incorporation of social groups into urban spaces, which combine to accrue privilege to some urban residents while they relegate disadvantage to others. The dynamism of emergent disaster response areas unearths cumulative mechanisms of privilege and disadvantage that ordinarily stitch and dissolve into the familiar fabric of urban life, which is often too subtle, ubiquitous, and slow-moving to uncover their production.

The disaster response provided by governmental and nongovernmental organizations is a critical opportunity for the possible recalibration of long-standing race and class inequalities embedded in urban spaces. However, governmental and nongovernmental organizations miss this opportunity entirely. Race and class processes intervene in official disaster response. This occurs from the earliest point of contact, the placement of disaster response centers, to the cognitively mapped-out spatial perimeters of disaster response among volunteers, to the emergence of diverse types of responder-survivor expectations, relations, and information sharing.

The entry of nonlocal entities such as FEMA and NGOs marks the reorganization of disaster areas into a new ecology of inequity, reconstituting White privilege and urban economic deprivation. This emergence of an ecology of inequity, which I explain in detail in the next chapter, escapes the purview of citizens as this occurs at a moment when most are still focused on the spectacle of physical destruction, fatality statistics, and the altruistic acts of first responders.

Chapter Outlines

This book, in eight chapters, successively tackles the empirical puzzle: Why and how do the racially minoritized and economically deprived urban disaster survivors lose ground to their White economically privileged neighbors after disaster? What is the role of disaster response in the reproduction of race and class inequality?

Chapter 1 reformulates this puzzle of disaster inequality as a question of nested processes of racializing, classing, and social capital (networking) relational stratification. This framework sets the stage for an investigation into how and why urban spaces, organizational environments, and social group hierarchies and relations may combine and operate to undermine the egalitarian distribution of public goods. In order to answer this question, the chapter continues the discussion of the concept of ecologies of inequity that I introduced in the introduction.

I argue in the chapter that ecologies of inequity create an ecology of privilege and an ecology of deprivation. These opposite sides of the same coin deliver the favorable and unfavorable spatial alignment of networks of governmental and nongovernmental organizations and their responders across urban areas differentiated by race and class. Ecological Privilege provides sustained, instrumental benefits for already privileged groups. The distributional impact of this ecological privilege translates into ecological deprivation for adjacent areas inhabited by racially minoritized and other marginalized groups.

Chapter 2 begins with a description of the racial and class topography of The Rockaways. I draw on observations and conversations with Rockaway disaster survivors and local disaster responders with tremendous local knowledge of their communities as well as my observations. The chapter then goes on to describe how these racial and class logics and topography of The Rockaways seep into the disaster response process from the placement of centers to the spatial perimeters set by disaster response site managers and volunteers. The chapter also discusses how the perceptions of disaster responders translate into racialized, classed zones of disaster response.

Chapter 3 similarly describes the racial and class topography of Canarsie, Brooklyn. I also explain the segmented incorporation of immigrants into the United States and how the refraction of legal or undocumented status extends to the segmentation in the receipt of FEMA disaster assistance. These statuses of citizenship intersect with homeowner and renter, specifically basement renter, statuses. My dialogues with Ferdinand, the nonlocal FEMA disaster response site manager, and his staff and volunteers from a variety of New York City and State agencies captured the hardships of Black immigrants. I present what I learned from these responders, Canarsie disaster survivors’ challenges with securing disaster assistance.

Chapter 4 opens with an introduction to Canarsie women who are employed Black working-class mothers. These women have become narrators of their own stories of hardship. The women describe their experiences of destruction and dispossession of their personal capital. They express their belief that they were forgotten by FEMA and the local government. They are frustrated that they are left to fend for themselves and their children. I discuss the importance of Black and economically deprived women’s informal networks to their survival in the immediate aftermath of disaster. The chapter then moves into the on-the-ground reality of the difficulty with which Canarsie disaster survivors navigate FEMA’s labyrinthine grant appeals process, which reroutes them to insurance companies and SBA.

Chapter 5 answers the question of what happens to social capital during crises and disasters. I illustrate how a disaster event erodes or suspends social network capital through social tie fragmentation, depletion, and deflation. I illustrate the similarities and the differences for White, economically privileged urban disaster survivors and survivors who are racially minoritized and economically deprived.

I introduce a newly coined concept, crisis capital, a transient form of relational capital that emerges in disaster areas. Crisis capital provides a much-needed support when the viability of mature networks is compromised. However, this crisis capital is short-lived and insufficient. Therefore, communities need this crisis capital supplemented with a more sustainable form of relational capital. This supplementation occurs in Westville, the White economically privileged residential area, through the amicable relations with a high resource, nonlocal NGO. However, the same NGO seemed to merely “take over” in the racially and ethnically diverse, economically deprived disaster area. This move disrupts the crisis capital of this community.

Chapter 6 explains how the on-the-ground operations of disaster response centers run by FEMA and NGO managers usher in a logic of response that replaces the logic of services, effectively displacing the service-dependent and economically deprived disaster survivors in Eastville and the Canarsie area. This disaster response logic weaves middle-class bias and color and class blindness—through norms, expectations, practices, and assumptions—into disaster response. Together, these complicate the ability of the most marginalized and invisible to access resources. I present my observations and conversations with disaster survivors who had visited FEMA, New York State (NYS), and NGO disaster response centers. I also present interviews with FEMA, NYS, and the leader of a large church. The chapter ends with Richy’s story, which demonstrates how this displacement of the Logic of Services by the Logic of Response lets the chronically economically deprived slip through the cracks.

Chapter 7 conceptualizes social capital as an interactional privilege, an important aspect of Ecological Privilege. White economically privileged Westvillers are able to create new instrumental social capital. Eastville’s ecological deprivation bars them from these interactional opportunities for creating new social capital with NGO responders.

Chapter 8 presents a flashback of how ecologies of inequity emerged in Canarsie and The Rockaways. The chapter presents four types of disaster response organization networks that emerged in Canarsie and The Rockaways: organization agglomeration, organization isolation, organization hosting, and organization coalition. These different configurations of organization networks emerged out of diverse types of institutional and spatial urban contexts. However, all involve FEMA, large and small NGOs, large and small local churches, and community-based organizations, but with varying relations. The types of relationships that connect these organizations help explain some of the nuances in the ways that Sandy survivors in Canarsie and The Rockaways experienced organization-mediated disaster response.

In the conclusion I provide a brief overview of the findings of all the data chapters of this book. I explain the role of governmental and nongovernmental organizations in creating an ecology of inequity. I make the argument for making race and class central to policies and practices of governmental and nongovernmental organizations. On the policy front, I provide a critique of the November 2020 National Advisory Council’s 2045 policy reform agenda for FEMA. This report only makes a cursory mention of race in discussing equity in disaster response. On the practice front, I make recommendations to nonlocal NGOs about how to avoid creating ecologies of inequity.

The epilogue is a casual conversation with Bishop Fabian and Freddie, the founder of Always With You, about the current state of post-Sandy Canarsie and Eastville. I present their reflections on the political, institutional, and organizational field since Sandy and how these continue to shape the financial and social capital of local churches and local community-based organizations serving the urban economically deprived, particularly within our current Covid-19 reality.

Appendix A, my interview guide, follows the epilogue. In Appendix B, I discuss my positionality in the field, my encounters with racial prejudice, and my suggestions for how to ethically and empathetically navigate the study of human beings experiencing abject circumstances, as a researcher. I end with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the study. Appemdix C presents demographic information on Canarsie and The Rockaways.

Reading This Book

In writing this book, I use pseudonyms such as “Westville,” “Eastville,” “Resiliency is Us,” and “Always With You,” to protect the privacy of research participants relaying personal experiences. I have also extended the use of pseudonyms to clergy and disaster field site managers who were providing expert explanations of the on-the-ground organizational practices. It should be noted that most participants asked that I use their real names. Beyond these pseudonyms, I also take additional steps to obscure locations. While the book provides demographic tables, graphs, and cartographic maps for Canarsie and the Rockaway peninsula, following recommendations of reviewers to provide an anchor for readers, these should be read as “in the general vicinity of” the sites of data collection. In discussions of parameters of neighborhoods and urban disaster areas, I rely on cognitive maps, in lieu of cartographic maps, described by research participants. I also frequently use “The Canarsie area” and “The Rockaways” to signify a less rigid treatment of these neighborhood boundaries.

I have taken additional steps to further obscure sites. I follow some other naming conventions that need clarification. Throughout this book, I use adjectives such as “FEMA-run” or “NYS-run,” and “NGO-run” centers, to remind the reader of the de facto relative, operational dominance of managers of various types of organizations at a particular center. It is important to note, however, that FEMA was present only on invitation to assist with the local efforts of disaster response. Furthermore, the centers themselves are non-permanent assemblages of relief organizations, governmental and nongovernmental, providing invaluable disaster assistance to disaster survivors. The venue of these disaster response centers were primarily provided by large churches already serving these communities. My use of “disaster response center” also encompasses “relief” “recovery” or “restoration” centers.

I also provide some guidance on reading the narratives in this book. The chapters shed light on the challenges of navigating organization-mediated disaster assistance. These narratives center the stories, reflections, and perspectives of those impacted by disaster and disaster assistance.

The narratives of these disaster survivors reflect how impactful the challenges they experienced were, and how they were making sense of their own experiences. Drawing on the tradition of Black Feminist methods, I select words such as “reflection” on experiences versus “perception” of experiences, as I argue that the latter may perpetuate the default invalidation of recounted harm experienced by members of racially minoritized people. As such, my role is not to interrogate the expressed understandings and experiences of my research participants. However, I do also present in this book, the explanations offered by disaster responders of standard organizational practice, on how programs are designed to work, and how official information and processes are meant to be understood and navigated.

Alternating among these multiple perspectives and experiential knowledges, and awareness, I illuminated the difference between intent and experience. This approach makes legible the inadvertent challenges and consequent harms emanating from the on-the-ground execution of disaster assistance. Finally, it is worth reminding the reader that the goal of the narrative presentation in this book does not seek to generalize a population, evaluate a program, nor does it claim that the experiences depicted were typical among disaster survivors in the disaster areas in the study. Instead, the book’s narrative helps us gain an in-depth understanding of a process as it unfolds in the lives of my research participants in their specific meaning context.

The Ethnography

The primary field sites for my ethnography, what I refer to as disaster response centers (i.e., relief, recovery, restoration), and their surrounding vicinities in Brooklyn and The Rockaways. I conducted expert interviews with the field site managers, who were from FEMA, New York State, a large, nonlocal NGO, and one community-based organization. I also interviewed leaders of local churches who rendered disaster assistance in Brooklyn and The Rockaways. I povide some demographic and geographic descriptions and maps for Canarsie and the Rockaway peninsula to help anchor the ethnography for readers. However, I demarcate urban disaster areas and neighborhoods according to the cognitive maps and the notions of belonging of research participants. Locational details of interviews and observations do not rigidly follow cartographic boundaries. For example, my use of “Canarsie” should be understood more broadly as in the vicinity of “The Canarsie area” or serving Canarsie disaster survivors. Similarly, in discussing an organizational practice that is corroborated across field site managers, I transpose some of the quotes of field site managers. I also use pseudonyms for NGOs and surrounding disaster response areas as “Westville” and “Eastville.”

The disaster survivors and responders with whom I spoke were primarily from the Canarsie area, which I refer to as Canarsie, and The Rockaways. In Canarsie, most of my interviews were with Caribbean immigrants, but I also learned of the experiences of African immigrants from the disaster responders at the FEMA-run Canarsie disaster response center, volunteers at a local community-based organization, and church leaders providing disaster response in Brooklyn. In The Rockaways, I conducted interviews with Irish White disaster survivors in Westville and non-Irish White disaster survivors, who tended to reside near the Eastville-Westville boundary. The latter were working-class renters, retirees, and immigrants from European countries such as Poland, Russia, and Italy. I also interviewed several Native Americans. Among the disaster survivors, who were phenotypically Black, some identified as American citizens with no migration in their family history, and others identified as part of the Caribbean diaspora.

Demographics and Geography of Participants

The frigid winter winds and disrupted transportation routes within the first few weeks meant that I mostly captured the experiences and perspectives of able-bodied residents who could walk to these centers. I alternated between canvassing and observing disaster areas, where I spoke with disaster survivors while they were either standing in front of their homes or peeking outside from their foyers. Other disaster survivors graciously invited me in to see their waterlogged basements and debris-filled backyards. I also spoke with interviewees sitting at tables in response centers, doing laundry at the laundromat, walking down the street, waiting at the bus stop, and even riding the bus. Other interviews took place in churches, at community meetings, and in business establishments.

Most people I approached agreed to talk with me. Only four declined my request for an interview. I attribute this willingness to participate partly because I was pursuing a broader social goal of making my findings available to disaster managers and others who are in a position to improve the efficacy of disaster response and consequently the experiences of disaster survivors.

Among disaster survivors whose activity I could observe, my primary recruitment goal was to capture nuanced perspectives on important dimensions relevant to theory, such as race-ethnicity, employment status, housing type and tenure (Adeola and Picou 2012); and migration or moving experience (Donner and Rodriguez 2008). As I gained more insight into prevalent economic circumstances, I inquired about transfer receipt through social services. Conversations with responders and disaster survivors often provided the source of further observations and inquiries within a particular disaster response center and surrounding disaster response areas. These included residential clusters and other sites of which I may not have been previously aware but that would later prove crucial to my central question of uncovering specific mechanisms of disaster response inequity.

My data collection was necessarily multimodal, including in-depth unstructured interviews, semi-structured questionnaires, and observation, both participant and direct (O’Leary 2005). I adapted interviews to suit participant preferences, time constraints, and comfort, alternating among video and audio recording, pen and paper recording during an interview, or informal talk without the formality of note-taking. In an incremental way, each observation and interview allowed me to sketch the contours of working theories. These theoretical sketches did evolve and eventually coalesce as I gained more data, intuition, and insight from time in the field. I achieved rapport with key research participants and had the opportunity to continually reflect on and confirm what I was learning about salient aspects of the meaning context.

The study participants relayed to me their disaster experiences, the complexity of navigating the terrain of organization-mediated disaster response while they were still experiencing these hardships of disaster. This means that I also had the opportunity to triangulate, through observation, some of the experiences of which they spoke even as these unfolded over the course of several months (Small 2009a; Burawoy 2003). The experience of disaster and the process of seeking disaster assistance do not merely involve the individual, but the network of relations that include the immediate and extended family and friendship networks, and neighbors of the disaster survivor. Sometimes while I interviewed a participant, the spouse or partner would later join in. I kept these interviews linked so that I did not lose meaningful context. Many people who were there alone volunteered information about their partners, despite their absence shared the disaster experiences of their partners, including where these experiences differed.

While I went to the field equipped with an interview guide and questionnaire (see Appendix A), most interviews ended up being mostly organic and conversational. Beyond the early response period, I was able to follow the interview guide more closely, either before or following organic conversations. My initial interviews felt scripted, awkward, and inappropriate for a post-disaster setting. My white paper with my questions served as a “white coat” that only separated me from disaster survivors. I began to feel like I was interrupting the flow of what these disaster survivors really wanted to share about their disaster experience. In fact, after answering all my scripted interview questions with quite terse responses, one disaster survivor at the laundromat asked who prepared these questions. She critiqued the more detailed, structured questions. I had included the position generator instrument, a measure of social capital used in survey research that asked about their social connections, the occupations of people they knew, and who offered to help.

In a playful tone I said with a smile, “Well, that would be me,” at which we both laughed. It was only then that she became more relaxed and began to tell me about her neighbor who was displaced from her basement and that no one had heard from her. She expressed how much she actually wanted to help, but because her neighbor had gone to a shelter, she could not reach the woman and had no way of helping her. The conversation proved most illuminating for the rest of my research, as I was more attuned to the plight of basement renters.

This exchange with this disaster survivor also began my future inquiry into the utility of pre-disaster social capital during moments of crisis. At that moment I decided that a more organic exchange would yield more interesting insights and make the interviews more pleasant for my research participants, who were already enduring so much. However, progressively moving beyond the early response period allowed me to rely on the interview guide more closely to capture specific details, either at the beginning or end of more organic conversations. I decided to approach my conversations with disaster response site managers with less formality. My frank conversational style gave me an opportunity to engage disaster responders in thinking more critically about the interactional context of the disaster response centers that they were managing and working in. I am hopeful that our exchanges also presented reflexive considerations of more equitable delivery of disaster assistance.

Ethnographic Discovery

Ethnographic discovery goes beyond the “sum of parts” of data collection and design. The researcher, who is the ethnographic instrument, must also adapt to un-foreseeable developments that arise in the field. This entails continually making judgments regarding pursuing new paths of inquiry and observation to fill gaps made visible only through iterative, reflective assessment of most recently attained data vis-à-vis previously collected data. This iteration of reflection-propagated return to the field relies on the ethnographer’s intuition and insight. Both of these skills sharpen as part of the product of ethnographic discovery. Over the duration of the ethnography, this incremental sharpening of insight equipped me to pull together and construct the narratives of communities surviving disaster. I weaved this metanarrative out of the many “stories” I learned during conversational interviews and observations.

Many of these conversations with disaster survivors and responders, whom I sat with, followed, and assisted, occurred primarily during the first six months, the height of organization disaster response. Subsequently, I would return, over the course of two years, for fourteen visits of two-to-four-day stints of twelve-to-fourteen-hour shifts, to these disaster response areas. During my returns to the field, I was able to recap and follow up with key informants and some research participants from the earlier response efforts. These were follow-up in-person conversations with disaster survivors, community-based organizations, local churches, and small business owners who had reopened their establishments.

Ethnographic Analysis

A central focus of my analysis included identifying, describing, interpreting, and theorizing the similarities and differences in interactions and informational exchanges among disaster survivors and responders. Comparison and triangulation were centerpieces of my analysis of observational and interview data. I distinguished what volunteers and site managers said about the assistance they offered disaster survivors from my own observations of these interactions and assistance with disaster survivors (Blumer 1958). I also triangulated what site managers said with what volunteers said about the quality of services provided. In some instances, I followed up on particular observations where a disaster survivor may not have received a particular kind of assistance, in order to capture their own assessment of their needs and whether they thought these needs had actually been met by responders. In order to accomplish differential experience, I compared these relations across locally meaningful distinctions in racial, ethnic, immigrant status, class, and urban areas.

Specifically, my analysis also entails comparing and explaining the interplay among urban spaces and organizational and networking/relational environments. I paid attention to how these dynamics intervene in social interactions on display in plain sight during disaster response. For this part of the analysis, I took seriously the intersubjective meanings (Blumer 1958) the participants made of themselves and their relation to others in the local environment in order to explain the social distance and symbolic boundaries among residents of these communities (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Lamont and Fournier 1992).

As earlier observations and interviews provided leads, I used what I incrementally learned to triangulate among the meanings (Blumer 1958) volunteers and responders assigned to their own observations and interactions with disaster survivors. Finally, I present my results that capture the “main story underlying the analysis” (LaRossa 2005, 850).

During my analytical process I was able to capture the racial and class implications of the on-the-ground organization and operation of disaster response. I also connected these to the changes in the ecological environment of the disaster areas I studied (Klinenberg 2002). Traveling back and forth to different disaster response areas, sometimes within the same day, allowed me to gain deeper insight into points of convergence and divergence in the collective experiential and meaningful contexts of disaster response across various urban landscapes.

The multilevel, multisite design of my ethnographic study yielded uncommon opportunities for fine-grain comparisons. I was able to comparatively analyze the experiences and accounts of Eastville, Westville, and Canarsie disaster survivors with the same NGO, Resiliency Is Us. Another opportunity for comparison was having the same site manager for both the Westville and Eastville NGO centers. Yet another was being able to compare the relationship that Resiliency Is Us established with both Westville and Eastville upon entry. I was fortunate to have met two local informants who began volunteering at the respective sites, even before the nonlocal NGO arrived. I also gained tremendous insight from my interviews with a handful of Eastville disaster survivors in Eastville, whom I quite by chance had an opportunity to observe and interview again at the Westville center.

I had similar comparative opportunities with disaster response centers run by New York State and by FEMA. I was able to compare disaster response approaches at two FEMA sites in The Rockaways (outside of Westville and Eastville) and Canarsie. I compared management styles of site managers at New York State and FEMA disaster response centers that offer the same suite of services. I was able to compare local experiences of leaders of small storefront churches engaged in disaster response with those of leaders of large churches, both within and across Brooklyn and The Rockaways.

Altogether, the multilevel design of this study allowed me to “see” the structures and processes of disaster response. The ethnographic design allowed me to trace how disaster response uniquely shaped the opportunities and constraints of disaster survivors over time. The comparative design across many contexts enabled me to capture crucial differences across race-and class-differentiated communities. The unique opportunity to have captured the disaster response experiences of Sandy survivors, told from multiple perspectives, has charged me with the responsibility of crafting an empathetic, nuanced synthesis of what I was fortunate to learn.