Disaster Resilience In Diverse Societies: Immigration, Risk and Recovery

Disasters are never experienced evenly. They unfold through existing social structures, institutional arrangements, mobility regimes, and inequalities. In increasingly diverse societies, immigration status, language, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, age, class, labor market position, and access to services shape how people prepare for, experience, respond to, and recover from disasters. Yet disaster research and emergency management practice often rely on broad categories such as “community,” “vulnerability,” or “public communication” that insufficiently capture the realities of immigrant, refugee, migrant, racialized, and culturally diverse populations.

This session invites papers examining the relationship between immigration, diversity, and disasters across national, local, and institutional contexts. It seeks to move beyond deficit-oriented framings that position migrants and minority communities only as vulnerable populations. Contributions may explore how diverse communities produce knowledge, mobilize informal infrastructures, sustain care, interpret risk, build social networks, and contribute to disaster resilience. The session also welcomes critical analyses of exclusion, marginalization, institutional neglect, and policy failure in preparedness, response, and recovery.

Particular attention will be given to how disaster risk intersects with migration systems and everyday settlement conditions, including language access, immigration status, housing precarity, employment insecurity, limited trust in authorities, unfamiliarity with local hazard systems, and exclusion from services. These barriers may intensify during wildfires, floods, storms, heat events, pandemics, power outages, displacement, and other emergencies.

By bringing these issues together, the session advances sociological understandings of disaster resilience in diverse societies and asks how disaster governance can become more inclusive, accountable, and responsive to mobile and diverse populations.