There are many sorts of catastrophes, ranging from devastating fires, floods, and earthquakes to sexual violence, genocides, and wars—but this collection of feminist essays focuses upon three broad types: epidemics/pandemics, anti-Black racism, and climate breakdown. These are public catastrophes, profoundly shaped by government action and inaction. The essays reveal that it is impossible to fully understand—or challenge—the structural harms associated with public catastrophe without appreciating their personal dimension, or reckoning with the ways that power thoroughly conditions our experiences as individuals and as members of communities. The public and private are intertwined, and during catastrophes, families and communities become repositories for loss, silence, mourning, witnessing, reconstruction, and reparation. The contributors to this collection examine how public catastrophes imprint themselves on lives, and how individuals narrate, process, and grapple with legacies of loss, and how, though both attention or neglect, governments and nonprofits frequently exacerbate preexisting vulnerabilities.

SARAH TOBIAS is the executive director of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University, where she also serves as affiliate faculty in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. She is the coeditor of The Perils of Populism (Rutgers University Press) and Feeling Democracy: Emotional Politics in the New Millenium (Rutgers University Press).  

ARLENE STEIN is a distinguished professor of sociology at Rutgers University and serves on the graduate faculty of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. She was the director of the Institute for Research on Women from 2016-2022. She is the author or editor of nine books, including Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness, The Perils of Populism (Rutgers University Press), and Feeling Democracy: Emotional Politics in the New Millenium (Rutgers University Press).