Disaster Survivors’ Journey Back Home: An Ethnographic Study of the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire
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Date
2024-12-19
Authors
Huang, Haisu
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation explores the lived experiences of wildfire disaster survivors, through ethnographic methods including 84 interviews and two-year participant observation. This dissertation extends sociological inquiry to an understudied population—rural communities—in the field of environmental justice, with a focus on the survivors’ decisions around home during and after the fire crisis. This dissertation focuses on how place shapes disaster experience, with attentiveness to variations based on class and place attachment. Although class backgrounds greatly influence the survivors’ recovery choices, they are not the only factors motivating the survivors’ responses and behaviors. This dissertation sheds lights on the possible non-economic reasons for their choices to increase the understanding of the vulnerability of the rural population. A central goal of this dissertation is to emphasize the importance of place as an axis that structures experiences and social relations in the context of disaster recovery. The rural place characters meant a different kind of social norm under which the survivors operated, largely shaped by how they were connected to place. Such varied connections to place in turn affect their perceptions of home, as in when home is safe or unsafe, when one should hold on to their home and when to give up, where to reestablish home after disaster, and ways to come up with creative solutions to home, such as informal housing like RV homes.
This dissertation concludes that the survivors’ experience is culturally and structurally shaped and place specific. Its primary contribution is to foreground the meaning of home during climate crisis, connecting social inequalities in disaster recovery with the characteristics of place. The findings contribute to environmental sociology, rural sociology, and sociology of place, demonstrating how place shapes experiences of recovery and rebuild, and how gendered care, residence time, and the informality of housing in the rural space influence the experiences of evacuation and recovery.
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Keywords
Disaster Recovery, Environmental Sociology, Ethnography, Home, Place, Wildfires