Elaine Enarson

Elaine Enarson is an American disaster sociologist currently working independently in Lyons, Colorado. Her personal experience in Hurricane Andrew sparked extensive work on gender-based vulnerability and capacity, writing from applied and teoretical perspectives on women's human rights, livelihoods, safety, housing, community roles, political mobilisation, family lives, and disaster quilting as well as gender and extreme heat, evacuation and disaster recovery. She has developed a number of gender and disaster training packages for practitioners and a manual for Canadian grass-roots women's groups on emergency preparedness. A founding member of the Gender and Disaster Network (GDN), Elaine was also the lead course developer of a FEMA course on social vulnerability and initiated a grass-roots risk assessment project with women in the Caribbean as well as the online Gender and Disaster Sourcebook. Currently she consults with UN agencies and teaches part time in her areas of interest. Elaine co-edited The Gendered Terrain of Disaster: Through Women's Eyes (1998) and Women and Katrina: The Gender Dimensions of Disaster Recovery (forthcoming) and is developing a monograph on these topics in US contexts.