“The Katrina disaster serves as a wake-up call and reveals how racial inequality and economic disparities are still a societal reality. There is an urgent need to analyze the spatial, socioeconomic, and psychological consequences of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath on the most vulnerable segments of our society: those who are economically marginalized, racially marked, spatially segregated, and/or linguistically isolated.”

Excerpt from Surviving Katrina and its Aftermath project proposal

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the National Science Foundation issued a special call through its cross-directory Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) program for Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) proposals to assess the hurricane’s impact and the relief efforts. An interdisciplinary team at ASU, in collaboration with geographer Dr. Christopher Airriess at Ball State University in Ohio, submitted a proposal: Surviving Katrina and its Aftermath: A Comparative Analysis of Community Mobilization and Access to Emergency Relief by Vietnamese Americans and African Americans in an Eastern New Orleans Suburb. This was one of five statistical analysis proposals funded by the agency. It stood out as a proposal that focuses on an often overlooked section of eastern New Orleans that boasts almost equal numbers of Vietnamese Americans and African Americans, and explores how each community utilized community resources to overcome linguistic, racial, and socioeconomic barriers for survival. This eighteen-month grant will address the impact of Hurricane Katrina on both communities, which already have experienced trauma—from fleeing the homeland in the case of Vietnamese Americans, to the trauma of racial and economic oppression in the case of African Americans who reside in these neighborhoods.

This project reflects the ways in which Asian Pacific American studies is developing transdisciplinary and productive collaborations with other faculty and centers at ASU Tempe. In particular, Southeast Asian Studies and Asian Pacific American studies share a commitment to documenting and researching the experiences of Southeast Asian American communities in the United States. The proposal was instigated through the recommendation of Dr. Karen Adams, the director of Southeast Asian Studies. Drs. Adams and Leong are developing a humanities-based comparative study about the same populations with a focus about collective memory and community resiliency that will complement the research for the NSF grant.

The ASU team is led by Dr. Wei Li, associate professor of Asian Pacific American Studies (APAS) and Dr. Angela Chia-Chen Chen, assistant professor in the College of Nursing and APAS affiliate faculty. Co-investigators include Dr. Karen J. Leong, associate professor of APAS & Women and Gender Studies; Dr. Verna Keith, associate professor of Sociology; Thuy-Kim Le, a lecturer in Languages and Literature; and Dr. Karen Adams, professor of Linguistics. Dr. Christopher Airriess, professor of geography, brings his valuable research experience and knowledge of the Vietnamese American community in New Orleans to this project. Alan Artibise, Social Sciences Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, formerly from the University of New Orleans, has assisted the team with his connections to urban planning scholars who study the city.

Please note:
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0555135.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.