The Mediation and Remediation of Disaster: Hurricanes Katrina and Felix in/and the New Media Environment

Abstract

Hurricanes Katrina and Felix made landfall in 2005 and 2007 on the Gulf Coast of the US and the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua respectively. Despite many economic, political and cultural differences between these two sites, they share a number of interesting similarities. Their inhabitants are subject to similar modes of racialized Othering and internal colonialism, and both places have vital links with the transnational cultural consciousness that Gilroy referred to as the Black Atlantic. Katrina and Felix also occurred at a time when centralized forms of media are increasingly perceived to be in crisis. This crisis is creating new spaces for the development of alternative ways of knowing, watching and making media. This paper draws on recent literature on decolonization by Mignolo, Escobar, Quijano and others to explore the prospects for decolonizing energies within the new media environment and a context of devastation wrought by neoliberalism and disaster.This research examines disasters in/and the new media environment, and suggests that activists should understand the distinctions between mainstream (or corporate) and alternative media, between top-down and grassroots media, and between "old" and "new" media, in relational and non-categorical rather than absolute terms. These media realms should be engaged from an awareness of how they interact with and impact upon one another. This research also suggests that disasters must be understood as ongoing and open-ended events embedded within historical, social, cultural, economic and political processes and systems. Media, policymaking and emergency management practices that are informed by an awareness of this complex embedding, and which are therefore able to take a long-term view of the unfolding of disasters, will be best equipped to engage effectively, and in democratically responsive ways, with disasters and in particular with the needs of those populations most vulnerable to their impacts.

Mídia e desastres: panorama da produção científica internacional de 1996 a 2016

“…Each of the identified articles was evaluated by its theoretical or methodological approach. The largest proportion of articles published on media and disasters during the period of analysis were case studies (EWART; LAITURI;KODRICH, 2008;LEITCH;BOHENSKY, 2014;MACIAS;HILYARD;FREIMUTH, 2009;PFEFFERBAUM et al, 2003;PRINCIPE, 2015;RODRIGUEZ;TRIANOR;QUARANTELLI, 2006;ZAVESTOSKI et al, 2004), followed by comparative case studies (CUPPLES; GLYNN, 2014;EFFERBAUM;ROSENHOLTZ, 2012;McLAUGHLIN, 2016;PARK;WANG;PINTO, 2016;SONNETT;JOHNSON;DOLAN, 2015); literature review (HOUSTON et al, 2015;POWER, 2013;PFEFFERBAUM et al, 2014;PFEFFERBAUM et al, 2015); and construction of theoretical models (SUSMAYADI et al, 2014).…”

“…Debates on the media and disasters, taking into account the type of disasters, focused on the categories of: Environmental disasters (CUPPLES; GLYNN, 2014;EWART;PFEFFERBAUM;ROSENHOLTZ, 2012;LAITURI;KODRICH, 2008;LEITCH;BOHENSKY, 2014;MACIAS;HILYARD;FREIMUTH, 2009;McLAUGHLIN, 2016;PRINCIPE, 2015;RODRIGUEZ;TRIANOR;QUARANTELLI, 2006;SONNETT;JOHNSON;DOLAN, 2015), with Katrina Hurricane being the most investigated natural disaster; Anthropogenic disasters (PARK; WANG; PINTO, 2016;PFEFFERBAUM et al, 2003;ZAVESTOSKI et al, 2004), with special emphasis on the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in the United States in 2001 and the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011; and lastly the category of Disasters (HOUSTON et al, 2015;POWER, 2013;PFEFFERBAUM et al, 2014;PFEFFERBAUM et al, 2015;SUSMAYADI et al, 2014) which concentrates researches of the two previous groups.…”

“…These researches have focused on how disasters are framed in media coverage (CUPPLES; GLYNN, 2014;EWART;PFEFFERBAUM;ROSENHOLTZ, 2012;PARK;WANG;PINTO, 2016;SONNETT;JOHNSON;DOLAN, 2015). Overall, studies have shown that news coverage of a disaster has a temporal character, that the media generally rely on official sources during catastrophes, and usually focuses on the dramatic and descriptive qualities of events, that is the impact of disasters on human beings or on the built or natural environment, and not on their causal explanations (HOUSTON; PFEFFERBAUM; ROSENHOLTZ, 2012).…”

Governance rescaling and the neoliberalization of nature: the case of biodiversity conservation in four EU countries

“…euractiv.com/sections/trade-society/anti-ttip-demonstrationsseize-european-capitals-309119), underlying from the start the contested nature of neoliberal hegemony, whereas the European Commission has recently rejected a citizen's petition against TTIP http://www.wdm.org.uk/trade/eur opean-commission-rejects-citizens'-petition-against-eu-us-tr ade-deal). In an effort to counter the online campaignsand indicative of the ambiguous role of new social media (Cupples & Glynn 2014) and not-for-profit organizations (McCarthy 2004) -the US embassy in Berlin offered $5.000-$20.000 to not-for-profit organizations to boost the pro-TTIP online presence (https://docs.google.com/ document/d/1oLBKsA_4pmdzSrVlebl6buH6CFvES4JqKqf RwliANlE/edit?pli=1#), bringing to the forefront the topdown attempts to manufacture consent for TTIP.…”

Inherited memory, social learning, and resilience: lessons from Spain's Great Blizzard of 1888

“…Works in several of the social sciences have paid attention to the reconstruction of disastrous events, the transmission of information about those events, and social perception of them (Cupples & Glynn, ; D'Ercole & Dolfus, ; Hermelin, ; Hewitt, ; Quarantelli & Dynes, ). Some have considered the territorial materialisation of the social perception of events, and examined whether those affected have developed prevention strategies or not, a lack of them being seen to result in ongoing risk (Calvo & Granell, ; Lara et al ., ; Lavell, ; Moreno & Romero, ; Perles, ).…”