“And Aretha sang, R-E-S-P-E-C-T!”
Brenda D. Phillips, Ph.D.
Texas Woman’s University
Presentation at the Reaching Women and Children in Disasters Conference, Miami, Florida. Visionary Plenary Session, June 4, 2000
Brenda Phillips is an associate professor at Texas Woman’s University where she teaches courses in the Federation of North Texas Area Universities Sociology Doctoral Program as well as the university’s new Women’s Studies Master’s Program (the first in Texas). She also serves as Secretary-Treasurer of the International Research Committee on Disasters of the International Sociological Association. Texas Woman’s University is home to a technical secretariat for the EDUPLANhemisferico, as facilitated by the Organization of American States. Her research centers on vulnerabilities and capacity-building. She has published numerous scholarly articles and is currently Principal Investigator of a research project on disaster recovery and minority groups funded by the National Science Foundation.
Abstract
Using metaphors from popular culture, this presentation looks at desirable changes that would alter current disaster management toward more equitable practice and planning. The ecosystemic framework is used to analyze the sources and potential solutions that underlie inequitable practice and planning.
The ecosystemic framework identifies multiple levels for analytical purposes. First, the micro-level examines interpersonal interactions that impact disaster management. Efforts to ameliorate inequity at this level include efforts by emergency managers and researchers to explore, appreciate, and integrate diverse cultural, economic, gender, national identity, and language perspectives and realities into practice, planning, and academic inquiry. Suggestions for working toward more culturally relative perspectives are offered, in a manner that seeks to use local capacities as well as build on their strengths.
The ecosystemic approach then moves us from the micro-level to the meso-level, where we examine the roles of organizations, agencies, and networks that seek to link the individual interpersonal level to the larger society. Educational programs (degree-granting in particular) are critiqued for exclusionary curricula that lay an inequitable foundation for disaster practice and planning. In addition, the presentation addresses some of the emerging and existing feminist efforts at the meso-level including the Gender and Disaster Network and the FEMA initiatives on vulnerability courses.
The exo-level looks at “settings that have power” including such things as development policy. As a way of understanding the exo-level, the Miami Declaration on Sustainable Development and Disasters is revisited for its thorough critique of policy that enables vulnerability and inequitable practice. Finally, the macro-level encapsulates previous levels within such abstract structures as the larger culture and political economy. At this point, the presentation points out the logical: that in order for disaster practice and policy to be more practical, systemic and global changes are required. To facilitate discussion throughout the rest of the conference, the Beijing Platform is examined for its potential to impact disaster practice and planning.
The Presentation
I would like to start by being a little academic and introducing the conceptual framework that impacts my way of thinking. It’s the ecosystem framework developed by Broffenbrenner and Garbarino, both psychologists (don’t tell my sociology colleagues). The ecosystemic framework identifies multiple levels within an environment. The micro-level looks at interpersonal interactions—think here of interactions between emergency managers and local neighborhoods, and of efforts to develop search and rescue teams, first aid training, local groups that mitigate or recover from disaster, etc. We sociologists call this the micro-level, because it focuses on face to face interaction (which makes symbolic interactionists really happy). At the meso-level, we have to look at organizations, agencies and networks that link the individual interpersonal level to the larger society. I’ll talk about educational programs as one example, and we should also think of emergency management associations—how many include women as officers, especially minority women or women from developing nations? The exo-level examines “settings that have power” such as development policy. We will briefly rethink policies that enable vulnerability and deter capacity-building. Finally, the macro-level encapsulates previous levels and tells us to look at the larger culture and political economy. At this level, we’ll talk about broadly-based, systemic change.
When Elaine asked me to speak this evening, she said I should be visionary, which I interpreted as free license to speak my mind. That’s a dangerous thing to say to a woman, especially one constrained by traditional life in an academic institution and bounded by the “norms” of what constitutes appropriate conduct, language, and presentation. But I have been on sabbatical for months now, being slowly but systematically deprogrammed in Costa Rica. So I did what any good feminist would do when faced with having to write an important presentation: I sat down, put on my headphones, and turned up Melissa Etheridge REAL LOUD.
It would be cliché to say that we need to rock and roll disaster planning and practice if it is going to be equitable. But bear with me while I play with this metaphor. My favorite Melissa Etheridge song is “Come to my Window”, a song that always means something different to me every time that I hear it. I’d like to take it out of its unrequited love context for a while. It’s the segue into the chorus that always makes me stop and think:
You don’t know how much I can give or how much I can take
Just to reach you, just to reach you.
Come to my window, crawl inside, wait by the light of the moon
Come to my window, I’ll be home soon
And then the intro to the second verse, “Keeping my eyes open, I cannot afford to sleep.”
People think that rock and roll is about drugs and sex and music, but it’s not. It’s about revolution, about challenging the system and finding a new path or, as Melissa sings in another song, “I will never be the same.” The same could said to be true of more equitable disaster planning and practice, but more on that in a minute.
Melissa is a child of the feminist mothers who gave birth to women’s music in the 1970s. Rock and roll in the 1960s had been very exclusionary and segregated by race and gender—it was very mainstream: white and male. Few women broke through, even fewer women of color. It took a series of social movements to open up our society, including revolutions brought about by music that brought people together in integrated concert halls. But it took a feminist revolution, women creating their own music, controlling their artistic endeavors, starting their own publishing and distribution companies and concert venues before someone like Melissa could become a superstar in the rock world. These women worked at the meso-level: where women created networks and companies that linked the individual to the larger society. Not unlike the Gender and Disaster Network or this very conference. This conference represents a challenge to emergency management and research as it exists.
We social scientists see moving from the micro to the macro level—from interpersonal interaction to systemic change that allows for more liberatory behaviors and opportunities, and a greater diversity of voices and perspectives. And that is what we need to foster equitable disaster planning and practice, comprehensive systemic change—although not exclusively within a local emergency manager’s office. I am ultimately talking about comprehensive institutional realignment and global systemic change. But enough of the social science jargon. Let’s go back to rock and roll—and start at the micro level.
Melissa sings “Come to my window.” I hear several compelling ideas here. First, “come”—not as in “call this 1-800 number in Denton Texas” where I happen to live and know that the FEMA staff there really DO care even though victims don’t really like the seemingly impersonal approach OR “here’s a course you can take for $45 plus books” (thank you FEMA for making the disaster courses free on-line, and for translating the Project Impact guide into Spanish and no thanks to developed nation organizations that force developing nations to pay for such materials). But COME, to the people, where they are, a decentralized and interpersonal, interactive, in-person practice and planning that starts at the local level, in the homes and neighborhoods, clubs, laundry rooms, break rooms, streams where they wash laundry and draw water, fields where they labor, churches, gyms, child care centers, bus stops, kitchens—where women live, work and exist—to their context, to gain an understanding and figure out what planning and preparedness would look like from their perspective, their resources, and their realities. In short, you can’t plan from your desk, you must be in the field. And you can’t do research without seeing the data gathering an analysis process from women’s eyes.
Think about it: to MY window. My as in me, where I am, to my window, my view, my perspective, the picture I see when look out from my eyes into my reality at my resources, my relationships, my risks. Come away from your reality, your assumptions about my life and see it through my eyes. We social scientists like to call this verstehen—or empathy.
We need to implement Melissa’s idea when she says “you don’t know how much I can take just to reach you.” I don’t know how many emergency managers have told me they have invited women, or African Americans, or Latinos or Native Americans or persons with disabilities to the meetings—but they just don’t come.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, former Freedom Singer from the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock (an a capella musical group) has written that coalition work—going across cultural, class, and gender barriers, is hard work. And here is a basic social science premise: we don’t get across the line from inviting THEM into OUR space—and we really blow it when we think in terms of us and them (in groups and out groups). Coalition work is hard work. It can only begin when those in power recognize their privilege, their resources, and share it. It can only begin when those of us in privileged positions work to destabilize the social systems that configure privilege and oppression, that give birth to and sustain vulnerabilities and risk. “You don’t know how much I can take just to reach you” means keep trying, especially when it gets really hard and you seem farther from the prize than ever: the prize of reducing vulnerabilities rendered possible by socially constructed inequalities.
We are on the verge of institutionalizing privilege in a new way: through educating emergency managers in degree programs. Wait a minute—I am an educator, what could l mean?! Sociologists know, with certainty, that people with educations typically come from middle-class families and retain their own views of reality and impose them on others. For example, most teachers are middle-class and often view elementary school children’s behavior as inappropriate—when it is just blue-collar behavior. I know, I grew up in a blue-collar family. From my window, the middle class (teachers, doctors, lawyers) was clueless. And though my childhood was very stable and economically sound, there were many times when dad was on the strike line and we weren’t sure if we’d have ahouse next month or not. I remember the year the company took away our dental benefits. I remember their disregard for worker safety and now my father has a serious hearing loss and major health problems. I remember my blue-collar friends who never made it to college and still work for minimum wage, you know, the ones you see in the Red Cross shelters after a disaster, the ones without insurance or a savings account.
If we want equitable disaster planning and practice, we have to start with the curriculum of disaster education programs that operate at the meso-level. Every single program MUST have required courses on vulnerability as well as a comprehensive understanding of social and economic difference built across the curriculum into every course. They MUST have required courses in cross-cultural communication, they MUST be multi-lingual. They must avoid the mistakes of previous emergency managers. For example,. If the victims won’t go to an indoor shelter because they fear aftershocks like they had in Mexico City in 1985, put up the damn tents—don’t wait a week to do it! If a group of disaster victims refuses to go to a particular shelter because the National Guard is serving food and they fled the war in El Salvador, then in the words of Joan Baez in her song “The Weary Mothers”, take off the uniforms and throw them in the trenches. Don’t expect people to conform to MY reality, but adapt practice and planning to THEIRS. Learning about and understanding the realities of others is hard work, a lifelong endeavor that never stops and always presents you with new data.
Melissa sings “keeping my eyes open I cannot afford to sleep” tells me to be engaged in the work of understanding others, always a student of others, using my eyes to take in and understand but never to assume. The outstanding issue of Stop Disasters that was published in 1995 included multiple stories from regional specialists working in Bangladesh, Turkey, Peru and other nations—telling stories of how men were given the llamas, seeds, rice, and other agricultural products needed to start the recovery, when in fact up to half of all the victims were female-headed households who received nothing (but thank you OXFAM for realizing this and intervening in Peru!) And we need to go beyond the obvious poverty of female heads of households and include not just women from all social and economic classes, but across cultures, languages, racial and ethnic groups, sexualities, family types, nations, educational levels, and gender systems. How many times have governmental policies excluded women and men in same-sex partnerships, where one person gets the resources as “head of household” and the other receives nothing, becoming dependent on their partner?
Sabbaticals make you do and say strange things. I deliberately left most of my academic books at home in Texas and took some unusual reference works with me. I just finished The Art of Happiness by his Holiness the Dalai Lama. In that book, I learned that what I am talking about is compassion, the basis for equitable practice and planning. There is a marvelous example of compassion in this book. The Dalai Lama is giving a series of talks in Arizona and stops at a hotel elevator. He quietly turns to the maid, standing there shyly. “Where are you from” he asks; “Mexico” she answers. They talk quietly about her homeland for a while and then he goes on. The next day, she brings a friend. The next day, more friends. At the end of the week, there is a receiving line of Mexican maids speaking softly with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Connecting across difference arises from compassion, from interpersonal connections, from eye contact.
Behaving compassionately may not sound like an academic concept, but it is based on the sociological perspective of “verstehen”, of knowing what it is like to be in another person’s situation.
Let’s look briefly at the exo-level, at issues of development policy. As I sat in my San Jose apartment, I watched and verbally cheered the efforts of those seeking change within the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Those of us working in and studying developing nations certainly understand how these financial programs can undermine local capacities and resources. In Tanzania, for example, they have led to urbanization and industrialization, leaving women alone in rural areas or bringing them into unfamiliar urban environments where their lack of social ties and unfamiliarity with new hazards places them more at risk. The same has been found to be true in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where absent husbands and the norms of purdah leave women reluctant to leave their homes. When cyclones hit, they die at higher rates as do their children. We do not have to reinvent a critique of the exo-level for more equitable gender practice and planning, because a 1996 event here in Miami did just that. We were fortunate that there were radicals inside the planning and organizing structure of the Hemispheric Congress on Disaster Reduction and Sustainable Development. They encouraged a renegade group (many of whom are still here, still lin the struggle) to construct “platform thirteen” that outlined what should be done about highly vulnerable populations (and I quote here):
“Successful sustainability and mitigation are tied to understanding the social construction of vulnerability. Traditional response can worsen life situations, increase disaster impact, and threaten sustainability. As significantly, vulnerable people bring knowledge, skills and insights to the challenges of living with and managing risk. Indigenous and local communities have developed successful survival and coping strategies that have evolved experientially. These local knowledge systems have much to contribute to a constructive dialogue on disaster management and sustainable development and the development of effective programs and projects.