Abstract This article explores how the global Coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic impacted United States higher education over the course of the first year from Spring 2020–Spring 2021. Utilizing a case study methodology, blending proprietary, closely held, public use, and archival data, we find that political and institutional factors shaped the decision to return to in‐person instruction or remain online in fall 2020, which in turn, influenced the enrollment and financial health of institutions in that semester and beyond. Although nearly every institution of higher education was impacted, we find that those most adversely impacted are 2‐year public and 4‐year private baccalaureate institutions. Despite considerable challenges resulting from COVID‐19, we highlight several practices of how systems and institutions are innovating and how this work can be replicated to positively impact higher education for years to come.

As natural-technological catastrophes become increasingly complex in their severity, scale, and duration, so too must our policy responses. Utilizing the 2010 BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as a case study, this paper explores the ecological, sociocultural, and political challenges from an interdisciplinary perspective. Consistent with prior research on catastrophes, the findings of this study indicate that the severity of disruption substantially influences the social construction of the occasion as policy actors are ill equipped to handle the challenges at all levels of government. Drawing their interdisciplinary backgrounds in history, political science, sociology, anthropology, communications, and literary studies, the authors offer an integrative policy solutions approach predicated on a model of network governance.

The down low has recently emerged as phenomenon where men have sex with men (MSM), but identify as 'heterosexual' or 'straight'. Although the down low has received considerable attention in United States media, little empirical research has sought to investigate this phenomenon beyond anecdotal evidence. Utilising data from the Urban Men's Health Study (UMHS) (n = 2881), this research offers a unique opportunity to investigate empirically claims of-the down low beyond small opportunistic samples. We find significant support for the down low among Blacks and Latinos and its association with high-risk sexual behaviour. These findings highlight the need for future research that better understands the impact of the phenomenon within a cultural and community context.

As our understanding of disaster shifts from an event concentrated in time and space to a social occasion occurring across time and space, so too must our explanations of disaster shift from theories of the middle range to broader theoretical frameworks. We explore the world-system approach in an effort to understand the upper limits of theory for disaster and offer this approach as a better understanding of how long-term development shapes social change. Utilizing media reports of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami from the United States to India, Indonesia and Thailand over a one-year period, we find perceptions of aid vary by economic zones and nation-states in the contemporary world system.

Funding for this project was provided under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Public Health Emergency Preparedness Cooperative Agreement

Opening Remarks Terrorist attacks on the United States (September 11, 2001), Madrid (March 2004), and London (July 2005); the Indian Ocean tsunami (December 2004); Hurricane Katrina (August 2005); and the Pakistan earthquake (October 2005), among others, have once again captured the interest of the international community, researchers, academics, and the media. The social science disaster research community has made important contributions to our understanding of disasters and has had a significant impact on disaster preparedness, mitigation, and recovery initiatives, and has managed (albeit limitedly) to bridge the gap between theory and practice. However, the massive failures in the aftermath of the tsunami and Katrina show that, to a large extent, decision-makers have ignored the extensive body of knowledge and the theoretical, methodological, and substantive contributions of disaster researchers, spanning close to five decades, with sociologists as the pioneers of this field of study. It is in this context that we have selected

Hurricane Katrina created an unprecedented need for sheltering and temporary housing across a four-state area along the Gulf Coast. This article reviews the disaster literature with respect to sheltering and temporary housing and contrasts how these needs actually developed with respect to both the preimpact and postimpact evacuation situations. The article also investigates the ways that intergovernmental planning failed to anticipate the need for shelter/housing solutions or to implement effective measures to put those plans into operation.

When Hurricane Katrina struck in August, 2005, people in the U.S. and around the world were dumbfounded by the scope and severity of the storm's impacts and equally astonished by the sheer incompetence of the governmental response to the largest catastrophe to strike the nation in the last one hundred years. Astonishment turned to anger when the public began to realize that, contrary to President Bush's early statement that the breach of the levees and the subsequent flooding could not have been anticipated, the devastating consequences for the Gulf region of a large storm like Katrina had long been predicted. Disaster training scenarios such as the " Hurricane Pam " exercise had already envisioned what would happen in New Orleans following a large hurricane, and the Bush administration had in fact been informed that Katrina was a catastrophe in the making on the weekend before the storm made landfall. Amid the shock and awe that accompanied the Katrina disaster, perhaps the most riveting images not only focused on how Ka-trina stripped bare the landscape of the Gulf Region but also illustrated how pre-existing social conditions led to vastly different consequences for the storm's victims. While better off residents fled the city in their cars, the poor, elderly, and disabled were unable or unwilling to leave (or both), and many residents lost their lives when the levees burst. Those who remained waited days to be rescued, and for some, help never came. Through a social triage process driven by negligence, incompetence, and perhaps even malice, other victims lost their lives in nursing homes, hospitals, and shelters. Victims with the fewest resources and the greatest needs, such as those who sought help at the Superdome and the Convention Center, lived in miserable conditions and then were transported out of New Orleans by agencies that cared little about their resettlement needs. When community residents stranded in New Orleans tried to survive by taking water, food, milk, and diapers, they were labeled as looters and thugs. When isolated pockets of violence developed after the flooding, New Orleans was treated as a war zone, and threats of deadly force were used against residents, particularly if they happened to be young black males. " Shoot to kill " orders issued two days after the levees broke undoubtedly hampered the ability of those trapped in New Orleans to assist one another. By slowing down search and rescue …