Cascading Disaster Imaginaries: The Future as Process in Coastal Louisiana

• In Event: Culture and the Construction of Expectations & Outcomes

Abstract

This study explores how people from high-risk coastal communities in southeastern Louisiana imagine the future of their homeplaces amid cascading environmental, social, and economic disruptions. Drawing on 72 qualitative interviews with both stayers and migrants, it investigates how individuals envision the future through two distinct prompts: an open-ended "canvas" of the future and a specific projection “50 years” ahead. The article proposes the concept of cascading disaster imaginaries to capture how participants understand the future not as a singular catastrophic event but as ongoing and unfolding, shaped by past experiences, place-based attachments, and cultural narratives. Cascading disaster imaginaries range from nostalgic visions of community heyday and cultural timelessness to hopeful and dystopian depictions of submergence, displacement, and social decay. These imaginaries are also informed by contingencies and material conditions, such as infrastructure, oil industry dependency, and flood mitigation, alongside cultural identity and affect. The study extends the sociology of the future and climate imaginaries by foregrounding how people from the frontlines of climate change construct futures through historically embedded practices and affective orientations. Doing so, it challenges rupture-based climate imaginaries by situating future-making within cascading disasters and offering a processual, place-based lens to understand how communities – broadly defined – negotiate uncertainty, hope, and loss in the Anthropocene.

Author

• Brandon Folse, University of Wyoming