SGER: Agency Within Disaster Preparedness and Response: The Role of Poverty and Disability

摘要：传统上，灾害研究假设人们可以自己决定是为自然灾害做准备，还是在收到灾难即将到来的警告时撤离。决定的能力被称为代理。该项目将有助于了解当人们的选择受到贫困的限制时，他们是如何做出备灾和疏散选择的。传统上，我们假设那些没有做好准备的人是非理性的；这种假设延续了一种代理谬论，即假设人们有目的地做出让他们或多或少变得脆弱的决定。当代理的概念从模型中移除时，这种形象会发生怎样的变化？如果一些群体没有机构，无论是由于贫困、残疾、精神疾病或情况而采取保护措施或选择疏散地点，应急管理如何且应该如何应对？该项目的重点是收集从新奥尔良疏散的家庭的事件历史，目的是了解机构。我们的目标是迅速开始收集这些历史，以便不仅对事件，而且对事件之前的时期有尽可能准确的记忆。该项目预计将对灾难中的疏散建模产生重大影响，特别是在这些模型假设人们可能没有选择的情况下。一个多学科团队将与研究生和本科生一起进行这项研究，从而在解决这一问题的同时吸引新的人和视角进入灾难研究。

Abstract:Traditionally, disaster research has assumed that people can make their own decisions about whether to prepare for natural disasters or to evacuate when warned that a disaster is impending. The ability to decide is known as agency. This project will help to understand how people make preparedness and evacuation choices when their choices are constrained by poverty. Traditionally, we assume that those who fail to prepare are irrational; this assumption perpetuates a fallacy of agency, which assumes that people purposefully make decisions that make them more or less vulnerable. How does this image change when the idea of agency is removed from the model? If some groups have no agency whether through poverty, disability, mental illness or circumstance to take protective measures or choose evacuation locations, how can and should emergency management respond? The project focuses on collecting event histories from families evacuated from New Orleans with the goal of understanding agency. The goal is to quickly begin collecting these histories in order to have as accurate as possibly memories of not only the event, but also the period leading up to the event. The project is expected to have major implications in evacuation modeling in disasters, particularly where those models assume choices that people may not have. A multidisciplinary team will work with graduate and undergraduates to conduct this research, thereby drawing new people and perspectives into disaster research while addressing this question