It was only last fall that San Diego County experienced its own crisis, the county-wide fires.   The wildfires were truly emphasized for their out-of-control "wildness," while the real reasons of urban sprawl were downplayed or flat-out ignored.  This crisis, like many others crisis around the world, such as famines, was framed as a case of "natural disaster," instead of a case of mismanaged urban planning, ill-led concepts of fire "prevention."  Therefore the causes fell on to nature, instead of socio-political reasons.

For many around the world who watched the news coverage of our local crisis, it appeared that only middle- to upper-class, Caucasian home-owners were affected by this disaster. Newscasters biasedly compared the state-of emergency disaster to New Orleans's Hurricane Katrina in a fashion that portrayed San Diegans as wealthy, coordinated, charitable and peaceful in contrast to New Orleaneans who were portrayed as poor, disorganized, and violent.  Essentially, San Diego "citizens" were framed as united, while New Orleans "refugees" were portrayed as lacking in unity. Just like Hurricane Katrina, the media coverage and the treatment of the San Diego fires were embedded in long-standing issues of class, race and ethnicity.

This roundtable aims to bring out many the socio-political reasons that contributed to the fire and the politics of who's stories were represented in the media and which ones remained untold.  For example, many of the fires’ human victims were migrant workers living in canyons who, largely because of their extreme marginalization, were not able to be reached and informed about the fires. In stark contrast to the mainstream coverage of property owners (like the TV reporter standing outside his own house for hours of coverage). The human toll of the fires was largely ignored, or even blamed on these victims for consuming UCSD Regional Burn Center resources for instance.

We hope you will join us for this special roundtable that will follow up on the global and theoretical themes of UCSD’s Sociology Dept’s 4th Annual 2008 Culture Conference.

Sincerely,

Andrew Cheyne, Geoffrey Fojtasek, Raquel Jacob-Almeida, Tricia Wang, and the UCSD Culture Conference Committee