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University of Connecticut Associate Professor of History Andy Horowitz visited Colgate University to give a lecture on his book, “Katrina: A History, 1915-2015,” on Wednesday, September 18, 2024.

Horowitz wants students to change their thinking about "natural disasters" like Hurricane Katrina.

“Disasters are not unpredictable attacks or acts of God that arrive without precedent,” Horowitz told the audience. “Their causes and consequences reach across much longer periods of time and space than we commonly imagined.”

Horowitz argues that "race, class and state policy" are "deeply tied" to natural disasters, and that these "structural issues" are to blame for "creating conditions for disaster to strike" well before a disaster like Hurricane Katrina actually happens, and are also to blame for the conditions after a disaster.

“Racism played a defining role in determining who could return afterward,” asserted Horowitz who went on to describe a post-Katrina New Orleans as being riddled with "systemic racism". 

One first-year student remarked that Horowitz's assertion that there’s "no such thing as a natural disaster" really stood out. "It’s not just about the destruction of Katrina. Policies that were supposed to help ended up reinforcing inequality,” he said.

Horowitz's bio on the UConn website indicates that his "research focuses on disasters and the questions they give rise to about race, class, community, trauma, inequality, the welfare state, extractive industry, metropolitan development, and environmental change."

It also mentions a book that Horowitz co-edited called, Critical Disaster Studies.

From Amazon's description:

This book announces the new, interdisciplinary field of critical disaster studies. Unlike most existing approaches to disaster, critical disaster studies begins with the idea that disasters are not objective facts, but rather are interpretive fictions—and they shape the way people see the world. By questioning the concept of disaster itself, critical disaster studies reveals the stakes of defining people or places as vulnerable, resilient, or at risk.

Horowitz and his co-editor, state in the introduction:

So here is a new idea: there is no such thing as a disaster.

There are floods and earthquakes, wars and famines, engineering failures and economic collapses, but to describe any of these things as a disaster represents an act of interpretation. The first principle of critical disaster studies is the insistence that “disaster” itself is an analytical conceit.

What critical disaster studies really sounds like is the application of critical race theory to disasters and disaster response efforts.

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