Research

Dissertation Work

Focusing on post-hurricane conditions after Hurricanes Matthew (2016) and Florence (2018), my dissertation titled “I Didn’t Want to be a Victim”: Examining Grassroots, Long-Term, Hurricane Recovery in Robeson County, NC  examines the hydro-social dynamics of uneven development, specifically, the relationship between aid and relief projects and the deepening, uneven vulnerability developing in Robeson County, NC. To do so, I re-interpret the “disaster management cycle” (commonly used in disaster and risk management tools) as a hydrosocial configuration. The disaster management cycle is a widely used model that describes the process by which governments, businesses, and civil society develop public policies and plans to reduce the impact of disasters on people, property, and infrastructure; react during and immediately following a disaster; and make recovery decisions after a disaster has occurred, in order to strengthen preparedness and reduce vulnerability in future iterations of the cycle. The case of Robeson County, however, suggests that this model does not take into account uneven power dynamics that shape how this management works. Thus, I re-interpret the disaster cycle as “a hydrosocial configuration,” which brings attention to the “spatial configurations of people, institutions, water flows, hydraulic technology and the biophysical environment that revolve around the control of water” (Boelens et. al., 2015). 

The first chapter of this dissertation shows that in Lumberton, the county’s seat, hydrosocial power configurations play out in relation to the historically uneven development of the city’s neighborhoods, as well as in the allocation of aid, resources, and in the responses to large wet-weather events such as hurricanes and the ensuing flooding. The second chapter emphasizes the ways vulnerability and resilience intermingle in these communities and impact their unique recovery processes. The third chapter  walks through the idea of  grassroots organizing as a means of climate adaptation and capacity-building, and the ways by which other locations in the United States can model after – or learn from – bottom-up, solution-oriented approaches in Robeson County, NC.