Denaturalizing Disaster: A Social Autopsy of the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave

During the week of the heat wave, over 500 Chicagoans died directly from the heat. Journalistically constructed and conventionally remembered as the city's most deadly natural disaster, the destructive 1995 heat wave was a sign and symptom of the new and dangerous forms of marginality and neglect endemic to contemporary American big cities and notably severe in Chicago. Sociological analysis of this structurally determined catastrophe illuminates the obvious relationship between poverty and suffering, and some of the institutional and social mechanisms upon which extreme forms of American insecurity are built. Offers a loose model for sociologizing, and thereby denaturalizing, disasters that are generally constructed according to categories of common sense and classified in a vocabulary that effaces their social logic. (Quotes from original text)