Elaine Enarson
Elaine Enarson is an American disaster sociologist whose personal experience in Hurricane Andrew sparked her extensive work on gender, vulnerability, and community resilience. The author of “Woods-Working Women: Sexual Integration in the U.S. Forest Service” (1984), she was the first director of the women’s studies program at the University of Nevada, served as coordinator of the Nevada Network Against Domestic Violence, and has taught sociology and women’s studies in Nevada and Colorado.
After teaching applied disaster sociology for several years in Manitoba, she recently returned to independent research and writing and is based in Lyons, Colorado. In addition to research publications, Enarson co-edited “The Gendered Terrain of Disaster: Through Women’s Eyes” (1998) and “Women, Gender and Disaster: Global Issues and Initiatives” (forthcoming from Sage India 2009). She is currently co-editing “Women and Katrina: The Gender Dimensions of Disaster Recovery.”
Enarson is a founding member of the Gender and Disaster Network and has convened numerous workshops on the topic, speaks widely to academic and nonacademic audiences, and serves as consultant and trainer with UN agencies and others. She was lead course developer of a Federal Emergency Management Agency course on social vulnerability, initiated and directed a grassroots risk assessment project with women in the Caribbean, and authored workbooks for women’s grassroots organizations on emergency preparedness and on gender for emergency managers. She is now writing a monograph on women and disaster in the United States and teaching part time in her areas of interest.
Workshop Abstracts
Gender and Disaster Network
Gendering the Agenda in the US?
Related Resources from Elaine Enarson
Gendering Disaster Risk Reduction: 57 Steps from Words To Action
with P.G.Dhar Chakrabarti, forthcoming in Women, Gender and Disaster: Global Issues and Initiatives (Sage Publications)
Related Resources by Elaine Enarson from the Natural Hazards Library Staff
Elaine’s working paper, Gender and Natural Disasters, published by the International Labour Office provides an excellent analysis of the aspects and impacts of gender and disasters.
This article is cited in several other research articles, papers, and other works:
Through women's eyes: A gendered research agenda for disaster social science
Disasters, 1998, Vol. 22, Issue 2.