Digital Commons Network^™

Socio-Ecological Vulnerability To Climate Change In South Florida, Emily Eisenhauer

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Awareness of extreme high tide flooding in coastal communities has been increasing in recent years, reflecting growing concern over accelerated sea level rise. As a low-lying, urban coastal community with high value real estate, Miami often tops the rankings of cities worldwide in terms of vulnerability to sea level rise. Understanding perceptions of these changes and how communities are dealing with the impacts reveals much about vulnerability to climate change and the challenges of adaptation.

This empirical study uses an innovative mixed-methods approach that combines ethnographic observations of high tide flooding, qualitative interviews and analysis of tidal data to reveal …

Storm Surges, Disaster Planning, And Vulnerable Populations At The Urban Periphery: Imagining A Resilient New York After Superstorm Sandy, Andrea L. Mcardle

Publications and Research

In the aftermath of Sandy, the destructive superstorm that had a devastating impact in New York City and other parts of the Northeastern U.S. in 2012, ideas and data proliferate about how coastal cities, such as New York, can pursue strategies of resilience to help withstand the next weather-related onslaught. This article argues that whether the city in fact acts resiliently must take into account the extent to which its proposals respond to the needs of vulnerable people housed along its coastline. Superstorm Sandy put a face to vulnerability, including 6,800 evacuees assigned to shelters, 1,800 of whom were residents …

The Dialectics Of Vulnerability: Breast Cancer And The Body In Prognosis, Nadine Ehlers

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper argues that breast cancer prognosis potentially produces a circular dialectic in which a) the subject is compelled to perceive the body as vulnerable and separate (alien) to the self, and the treatments required make the body more vulnerable, more alien and b) this is held in tension with the fact that the very alienation and heightened vulnerability of the body in breast cancer treatment is productive; it collapses the boundaries through which the body and self are understood, often demands a conscious intimacy of/with the body, and points to critical enactments and understandings of embodied subjectivity. I use …