Surviving Katrina and its Aftermath

APAS faculty, along with faculty in other units at ASU and in Indiana, acquired a National Science Foundation (NSF) Human and Social Dynamics Small Grant for Exploratory Research for an interdisciplinary research project entitled, “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.”

The Katrina disaster served 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.

This project thus focused on an over-looked area of eastern New Orleans that has almost equal numbers of Vietnamese Americans and African Americans, and explored how each community utilized resources to overcome linguistic, racial, and socioeconomic barriers for survival.

The grant is led by Dr. Wei Li, associate professor of APAS and Geography; Dr. Angela Chia-Chen Chen, assistant professor in ASU’s College of Nursing & Healthcare Innovation; and Dr. Christopher A. Airriess, professor of Geography at Ball State University. The grant addresses the impact Katrina had on these two communities in relation to previous trauma, including the experiences that Vietnamese Americans endured while fleeing their homeland, and the racial and economic oppression suffered by African Americans in
these neighborhoods.

The project reflects APAS’ commitment to developing transdisciplinary and interethnic collaborations within and outside of ASU. The proposal was based on the recommendation of Dr. Karen Adams, past director of ASU’s former Program for Southeast Asian Studies. Additional co-Principal Investigators include Dr. Verna Keith, now professor of Sociology at University of Florida and Karen Leong, associate professor of APAS and Women and Gender studies at ASU. 

Recent and forthcoming publications by the team include:

“Prior Trauma, Poverty, and Health among Vietnamese American Katrina Survivors,” International Nursing Review Oct/Nov 2007.

“Economic Vulnerability, Discrimination, and Hurricane Katrina: Health among Black Katrina Survivors in Eastern New

Orleans,” Journal of the American Psychi-atric Nurses Association, Oct/Nov 2007. “From Invisibility to Hypervisibility: The Complexity of Race, Survival, and Resiliency for the Vietnamese American Community in New Orleans,” in K. Bates & R. Swan, eds., Through the Eye of Katrina: Social Justice in the United States, 2007.
“Resilient History and the Rebuilding of a Community: The Vietnamese American Community in New Orleans East,” Journal of American History, Dec 2007.