Disaster Anthropology

Disaster Anthropology uses theoretical and methodological tools from across anthropological subfields to understand the effects of disasters. Anthropologists based in academia and practice, often working collaboratively or across disciplines, seek to understand the relationships among historical, social, cultural, economic, political, environmental, and climatic factors in every type of disaster and humanitarian crisis across the globe. Practitioners often work within disaster response agencies in such functions as policy reform, program design, and disaster response management. Academics work in anthropology and interdisciplinary centers and departments, studying and teaching about disaster and anthropological issues. Disaster anthropologists link closely with broader interdisciplinary disaster studies and practices. They contribute an anthropological, holistic, and long-term perspective, including the use of ethnography and participant observation, theories, and analyses. In the early 21st century there has been considerable, and constantly increasing, recognition of disaster anthropology. This area of work includes recognition of what disaster anthropology has to contribute and its place as an appropriate field of engagement for anthropologists. This recognition has been demonstrated by the publication of numerous books, chapters, articles, special journal issues, and hundreds of conference presentations. Disaster anthropology has gained the support of the major anthropology associations such as the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), resulting in the formation of specialized formalized bodies such as the Risk and Disaster Topical Interest Group (RDTIG) within the SfAA, and the Culture and Disaster Network (CADAN). Accordingly, there are also an increasing number of targeted university anthropology courses on disasters. Disaster anthropologists contribute to the overall understanding of how and why disasters have the impacts that they do and what the consequences of disasters can be. By examining disaster contexts, disaster anthropologists improve understanding of pre-existing circumstances that contribute to those disasters, including people’s perspectives on hazards, risks, uncertainty, inequality, and inequity. Disaster anthropologists have shown that disasters are the visible, explicit result of deeper and more complex processes. Anthropologists share this work in governmental, nongovernmental, academic, and public arenas. Disaster anthropology brings together critical lines of inquiry from the larger fields of anthropology and disaster studies, offering valuable perspectives not only on understanding but also on improving disaster conditions.

Advancing the Field of Disaster Response Management: Toward a Design Science Approach

Multiorganizational response to emergencies and disasters requires collaboration. How to improve the collective response is therefore an essential question, but not easy to answer. In disaster research, normative research with a focus on providing evidence for how to improve professional practice has traditionally received less attention than explanatory ones. The aim of this article, using insights from design science where normative research is more common, is to suggest a complementary approach to response management research. Our approach, which combines experimental and explanatory research, is applied to a study of goal alignment. Goal alignment among response actors is often recommended despite literature’s contradictory evidence regarding its effect. We conducted an experiment with 111 participants, who, in groups of three, played a computer game under one of two conditions (goal alignment or not). Our results show that aligning goals did not improve the outcome in the game. Although this may serve as a counterargument to implementing goal alignment interventions, there are concerns with such conclusions. These reservations include, but are not limited to, the lack of validated models to use in experiments. Nevertheless, our suggested research approach and the goal alignment experiment highlight the importance of testing interventions and their effectiveness before implementation.

An ontology for sharing and managing information in disaster response: An illustrative case study of flood evacuation

Information management and sharing is an essential ingredient, but a difficult and challenging problem for disaster response management. This paper proposes an ontology as a model to organize and structure information in order to improve the information management and sharing in disaster response management. The ontology was designed and developed based on philosophically grounded foundational ontologies. It was also implemented in ontological languages and demonstrated and evaluated in a case study of the flood evacuation process. This paper also provides a systematic approach to develop a well-founded domain ontology that addresses both static and dynamic aspects of a given domain.

Large-Scale Disaster Response Management

This chapter provides readers with an overview of how social media has enhanced large-scale natural disaster response at the Department of Homeland Security and its partners. The authors of this chapter present the history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and how its successes and failures have shaped how the Department of Homeland Security has managed trends in increased community participation and information technology. Concepts from Systems Engineering frame the discussion around resilience engineering, network analysis, information systems, and human systems integration as they pertain to how social media can be integrated more effectively in large-scale disaster response. Examples of social media in disaster response are presented including a more in-depth case study on the use of social media during the 2012 Hurricane Sandy response. The chapter concludes with a proposed framework of a decision support system which integrates the benefits of social media while mitigating its risks.

Emergency Operation and Coordination Center (EOCC) for Disaster Response Management

Disaster management is often portrayed in negative rather than positive terms. Although, it is claimed that proper preparation for any disaster has been planned, it frequently fails to achieve positive outcomes from the planning itself. The emergency operation and coordination center (EOCC) which is the central point for all coordination and organising works is normally to be blamed for disaster response failure. Hence, the objective of this study is to examine issues with effective emergency operation and coordination center (EOCC) during disaster response. This study uses a qualitative research method. The researcher conducts an interview survey and focus group discussion for data collection in order to gain a comprehensive overview of the situation and understand the phenomena involved. The population for this study is infantry army officers. Purposive sampling is used such that only those personnel involved in disaster response are interviewed. This study found that the EOCC organization structure is clear and it follows the command and control military hierarchy. The leader with the relevant rank, having the experience and knowledge on managing disaster and having the respect and control from subordinates is appointed for the leadership role in the EOCC. However, inter-agency cooperation can be an issue as there is an overlapping of roles and responsibilities and inter-agency power struggle. Therefore, this issue leads to chaos and tension in the EOCC as there would be variance and inconsistency in the coordination and communication among infantry personnel and inter-agency.

PEER

While government agencies, NGOs, and even commercial entities immediately swing into action to help out, in the case of large disasters, one of the biggest resources – citizens themselves – are underutilized. The rise of social media creates an opportunity for the citizen participation for disaster response management. By harnessing the power of citizen crowdsourcing, the government can have enhanced disaster situation awareness and utilize resources provided by citizen volunteers, resulting in more effective disaster responses. In this paper, the prototype Public Engagement in Emergency Response (PEER) framework is presented. It provides a comprehensive online and mobile crowdsourcing platform for situation reporting and resource volunteering. Events are described that transpired in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy, which demonstrate the benefits of using the PEER framework in a major disaster situation. Also described is how it can alleviate some of the issues associated with the crowdsourcing responses such as fraud.