Unequal Recoveries, Unequal Futures: Youth, Social Inequality, and the Life Course of Disaster

Existing research demonstrates that disaster exposure is never socially neutral: poverty, gender, race, ethnicity, migration status, disability, housing instability, family resources, and educational inequality shape exposure, vulnerability, and recovery from disaster and climate-related hazards. At the same time, youth studies remind us that childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood are socially structured transitions, during which disruptions to schooling, caregiving, employment, peer networks, and place can have long-term consequences.

This panel seeks to bring disaster sociology into closer conversation with youth sociology by asking how disasters and climate emergencies alter pathways into education, work, family life, civic participation, migration, and adulthood. We are especially interested in papers that examine cumulative disadvantage, interrupted schooling, household labor, early marriage, displacement, livelihood loss, and unequal access to adaptation resources.

Possible paper topics include:

• Climate disasters and educational disruption among children and youth.
• Youth poverty, family stress, and post-disaster recovery.
• Displacement, migration, and young people’s transitions to adulthood.
• Race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, and disparities in disaster resilience.
• Youth labor, livelihood precarity, and climate-related economic disruption.
• Life-course approaches to disaster impacts.