Dying alone: A social autopsy of the 1995 Chicago heat wave

In July, 1995, Chicago experienced the most proportionately deadly heat disaster in recorded American history: 739 city residents in excess of the norm died and over 4,000 people were hospitalized for heat-related problems during a single week. Although the city climate was unusually dangerous, epidemiologists, public health researchers, and medical scientists have found that the extreme weather does not account for the historic death toll in Chicago. This dissertation, a social autopsy of the heat wave, is a multi-methodological study of both the social conditions that made it possible for so many Chicagoans to die during the week, and of the conditions that make these deaths so easy to overlook, dehumanize, or forget.; The Introduction situates the dissertation within the sociological literature on urban poverty, inequality, race and social division, health and risk positions, welfare states, and the social features of nature. Chapter Two, The Political, Medical, and Social Autopsies, shows how the official political and scientific accounts of the heat wave have explained the event and introduces the social autopsy as a means of understanding the social nature of mortality, Chapter Three, Dying Alone: The Social Production of Isolation, focuses on the twin questions of (i) why so many Chicagoans died alone, behind locked doors and sealed windows, during the heat wave, and (ii) why so many Chicagoans live alone, with limited social contacts, during normal times.; Chapter Four, A Tale of Two Neighborhoods, compares two neighboring community areas with similar statistical profiles (in terms of seniors living alone, proportion of people living in poverty, and crime) but dramatically different mortality rates during the disaster. This comparison is designed to consider the social and spatial conditions that facilitate or undermine local support systems and affect the viability of collective life. Chapter Five, The State of Disaster, considers the role of the local state in determining levels of vulnerability as well as in responding to and recovering from an acute social crisis. Chapter Six, Naturalizing Disaster, examines the conditions in which local journalists symbolically constructed the heat wave as a public event and charts the impact of new forces within the journalistic field during the news making process. The dissertation concludes with an account of the paupers' funeral after the heat wave. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...