Collaborative Research: RUI: Ethics of Care and Compounded Disaster

When a disaster strikes, health care workers spring into response, treat the injured and aid the sick. But what happens when disasters keep happening, one after another? How do health care workers cope with the constant demands of disaster conditions?

This project documents how health care workers responded to disaster conditions, cared for patients, and worked to rebuild the health care system following a major natural disaster. The research is important because disasters and health emergencies are becoming more frequent and more severe. Therefore, gathering data on how the health care work force responds emotionally to prolonged crisis conditions can aid in designing more effective responses.

The broader impacts of this project include the training underrepresented students in anthropology and broadening participation for students underrepresented in science. Data from the project will be disseminated to improve healthcare delivery in post-disaster conditions. This project is jointly funded by Cultural Anthropology, and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR)

This project examines whether the ethics of healthcare provisioning transform under conditions of "compounded disaster," through an investigation of disaster recovery in Puerto Rico, whose infrastructure was devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017, and was still operating under conditions of sustained emergency at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The central question of this research is: Did health care workers' experiences during and after Hurricane Maria transform their ethics of care?

The ethics of care refers to the practices and self-understanding that guide and motivate those who do the work of caring for others. The investigators hypothesize that health care workers developed a new ethics of care that drew upon pre-existing cultural features, but reflects a new sense of solidarity, greater efficacy, and shared purpose forged in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

The investigators anticipate that this new ethics of care has evolved or transformed through compounding disasters including earthquake swarms and COVID-19. The research design includes data collection through individual interviews, remote focus groups, and on-site participant observation. The project contributes to the scientific understanding of the underlying cultural processes through which disasters transform communities; whether compounded disasters have a geometric or exponential impact on these communities; and also, if the ethics of care fundamentally change under these circumstances.

This project generates theory to explain the underlying cultural processes through which (1) disasters transform communities and (2) care workers forge practices and self-understandings that aid in the process of disaster recovery.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.