Denaturalizing Disaster: Teaching Comparatively on New Orleans and Detroit

NASA/JPL/NGA

Iteach on race, ethnicity, and urban problems at a university in Detroit. The setting amplifies social divisions based on race and class. My classrooms are generally populated by upper-level undergraduate students and professional and graduate students ranging in age from their early 20s through their mid-50s. About half the students in any given class live in this hyper-segregated city. Students living in predominantly white suburban areas have less familiarity with the intense challenges facing their classmates, which include the lack of an adequate labor market for city residents, concentrated poverty, high crime rates, residential segregation, poor public transportation, and urban sprawl. Students living in the city are left in a difficult position. On the one hand, most share a hope for mobility that often includes leaving the city. On the other hand, Detroit students are personally implicated in (and resent) the negative stereotypes held about the city and its residents. They reasonably share a defensive posture and are repeatedly forced to face disaster "in the eye."

Teaching in Detroit is a model for teaching in hard times because Detroit exists "in the eye of the storm," and represents what is disastrous about our current economic relationships. This model also shows us that crises are not discrete events. Urban areas across the country increasingly share cityscapes of boarded-up shops, fire-ravaged buildings, and decayed billboards. Similarly, suburban students who have, through the economic collapse, started to understand the implications of disaster find greater common cause with city residents.

Over the winter 2009 semester, in a race relations course, I encouraged students to look for commonalities based on the experience of "disaster" and rethink how they distinguished "natural" from "manmade" calamities. I wanted my students to see that an "act of God" is more complicated than the phrase implies. I built on the premise that natural events, including droughts and hurricanes, are catastrophic only in relation to human activity. People shape their relationships to the built and natural environment, and make decisions about where to settle and what resources to use in maintaining infrastructure that turn a storm into a calamity. Thinking about both "natural" and "social" disasters as human products encourages a relational understanding of the broader dynamics, actions, and dominant actors that generate episodic crises.

NASA/JPL/NGA

In the course, students built a comparative frame around disaster by comparing Detroit and pre-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Their readings proposed a comparative framework for understanding patterned and recurring crises. Students identified common features of the two cities, features which were produced by housing segregation, economic decline, and inadequate federal relief. We also considered post-Katrina recovery efforts, weighed their successes and failures, and tried to imagine similar strategies for economic recovery in Detroit.

Having carefully considered the roots of urban crises, students asked themselves personal questions about how they reproduced social inequality. They considered where they would like to live and why, their differential access to the resources needed to realize their desires, and alternate forms of mobility. They pushed each other to question who they were as individual and collective actors amidst disaster, and struggled to build solidarity around opportunities for action. They reconsidered themselves as an interrelated group with common, or at least compatible, interests, disadvantaged by industrial decisions in which they had little influence, and a city government that had failed to protect their security and stability. Rather than being demoralized, students felt empowered because they had gained tools to articulate their concerns. Some were motivated to move forward in joining the struggle to solve their city's problems. Teaching in the context of disaster can produce this result when instructor and students understand their experience as shared. The classroom becomes a place for solidarity that can lead to future activism and community engagement.

An "Unnatural" Disaster

Students from Detroit generally recognize they live in what many call a "war zone." They experience an uncomfortable tension characterizing disasters more generally: how can one appreciate the extent and severity...