Kinship in Crisis: Informal Care Networks and Survival Strategies in the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave and 2005 Hurricane Katrina

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-509-6_39How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Kinship as Infrastructure; Informal Care Networks; Disaster Sociology; Racialized Inequality

Abstract

This paper investigates how kinship networks function as informal care infrastructure during urban disasters, with a comparative focus on the 1995 Chicago Heatwave and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. While natural disasters are often framed as equalizing events, mounting evidence reveals that their impacts are unevenly distributed along lines of race, class, and geography. Previous scholarship tends to conceptualize kinship as a static biological or legal relation; this study instead adopts a relational approach that theorizes kinship as a set of socially enacted practices and infrastructure. Drawing on a comparative case study methodology, the paper analyzes how informal care networks were activated or failed to be activated when formal systems collapsed. Findings show that the capacity of kinship to operate as infrastructure is neither universal nor evenly distributed: it is contingent upon spatial proximity, social trust, intergenerational co-residence, and access to resources. In both cases, kinship networks served as critical life-saving mechanisms in the absence of state intervention, yet those without such networks—particularly elderly or socially isolated individuals—faced heightened mortality or displacement. The analysis further reveals how these networks are shaped by historically entrenched inequalities, including racial segregation and neoliberal state withdrawal. It concludes that kinship should not be treated as a default safety net, but rather as a fragile and uneven resource that must be institutionally recognized and supplemented by a robust, equitable public care infrastructure in disaster governance.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jingxuan Wang
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/15
TI  - Kinship in Crisis: Informal Care Networks and Survival Strategies in the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave and 2005 Hurricane Katrina
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Mental Growth and Human Resilience (MGHR 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 360
EP  - 368
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-509-6_39
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-509-6_39
ID  - Wang2025
ER  -