Sociology Students Lend a Hand in New Orleans

Last year, graduate student Amy Bailey volunteered to help hurricane victims in New Orleans. When she returned to Seattle and shared her experiences with colleagues in the UW Department of Sociology, they were inspired to do the same.

Ten sociology graduate students (including Bailey) and thirteen students from the UW School of Law spent spring break in New Orleans, working with Common Ground Collective, a non-profit created to help the recovery effort. While the law students provided legal aid, the sociology students got down and dirty. They gutted buildings, reframed portions of a house, installed drywall, and took on other tasks as needed.

“There was no electricity in the area where we were working,” says Irina Voloshin. “We had to drag generators around. Things that should have taken two hours took six due to lack of infrastructure.”

“It’s almost a war zone,” adds fellow volunteer Jon Agnone. “The police presence is the military. You pass by rows and rows of razed houses. The scale of decimation is hard to get out of your mind.”

Agnone is president of the Department of Sociology’s Graduate Student Association, which raised funds from UW faculty, staff, friends, and family, and secured a grant from the UW Learning for Leadership Council, to cover travel expenses and purchase safety equipment for the volunteers. 

The students volunteered for personal rather than academic reasons, but many discovered that the experience related to their studies. Voloshin, whose focus is inequality, found New Orleans to be a heartbreaking case study. While poor neighborhoods hard hit by the storm were still in shambles, tourist areas had been rebuilt. “Upon our arrival there, it became clear how relevant this is to much of what we’re studying,” she says. “It’s not why I went down there, but I did find that it was directly pertinent to what I’m drawn to in sociology.”

Agnone had a similar response. “Social scientists—at least quantitative social scientists—tend to be disengaged and distanced from what they study,” he says. “Being able to see it up close contextualizes it in a different way.”

This benefit was not lost on Sociology lecturer Jonathan Wender, who invited four of the students to share their observations in his “Social Problems” course. The students are planning a similar panel for the broader department community.

“People are surprised that things haven’t improved more in New Orleans,” says Agnone. “Keeping attention on the issue is really important. I think that’s the number one thing we can do now.”