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I teach anthropology and environmental studies at Haveford College, just outside of Philly. Currently, I'm holed up in a cabin in the Adirondacks in upstate New York with several family members, including my spouse and 4 year old daughter and 3 dogs. I started working on disasters by accident, when one day in 2001 I was walking to class at NYU and saw the World Trade Center buildings on flames. I have known Kim for a few year and I contacted her to connect with folks around Covid-19 and its imacts.

I'm particularly intersted in issues of communal grief, mourning, and bereavement. Also, I'm interested in the religious response to Covid-19.

Approximately 90 percent of the American Red Cross membership is volunteer, drawing people from all ages, ethnicity, and background. These volunteers respond to nearly 70,000 disasters every year, mostly home and apartment fires. They also put on training programs and blood drives.

This article utilizes excerpts from interviews to illustrate the story narrative of an illness, showing how emotion and values are reflected in the creation of a "plot" of the narrative, and uses statistics and broader research to analize these stories from a broader, more societal perspective. 

With every new disaster it faces, the ARC draws much on its own research and the experiances of the Global Red Cross. Recent major domsetic disasters the ARC has faced include Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, 

I looked into the history of the MSF, the Congo Republic's Civil War, and international policy regarding the treatment of sexual and gender based violance in the humanitarian community, including the security council legislation refereced in the article.

The citations found in this article's bibliography tell us that the information presented was drawn from various research articles about past responses to large disease outbreaks, and public health policies regarding topics such as food safety and bioweapons. This article is an interpertation of existing information, and does not seem to provide any new research.

I researched

1. Early fire response systems mentioned in the article, such as fireproof blankets, early fire extinguishers, and fireproof building construction

2. Underwriters Labs and other safety research labratories

3. The final reports on the cause of the WTC collapse

Didier Fassin is a French anthropologist and a sociologist in the school of science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France. Fassan is also trained as a physician in internal medicine and holds a degree in public health. Some of his early research focused on medical anthropology, the AIDS epidemic, mortality disparities, and global health. 

I looked up disaster capitalism, how emergency response mutual aid to the katrina disaster was handled, and how reconstruction has progressed in more recient years.

The bibliography of this article shows that most of the data drawn for this paper was from other scholarly papers, which leads me to believe that no new research or studies were done to gain information for this article.