Care, Surveillance and Legal Mobilization

Legal institutions must be mobilized by people and institutions in response to disaster.  Disaster has brought payments to people in two different ways: as victim and as people who have been rescuers.  In studying assistance after disaster, we often treat programs as though they are distinct and experienced separately. Yet people encounter the law in disaster after having encountered other law in their lives, and interpret how to make legal claims through what they know about other programs.  Similarly, state responses to disaster or efforts to mitigate or respond often work in ways that are characteristic across social programs. Although care might well be the goal of disaster assistance, for example, in the United States it is one program in a welfare state with goal of getting people off assistance and ensuring that poor people take responsibility for themselves.  The people who need assistance the most can experience it as hard, confusing and frightening when it ends before anyone can find a job or get resettled, whatever the goal.  This project draws on assistance for people who fled the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.