Tim Haney, PhD
Researcher, Educator, and Community-Engaged Scholar
Dr. Tim Haney is a sociologist of disasters, the environment science, and cities. Tim is currently a Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University and program coordinator for MRU’s sociology program. Dr. Haney founded and served as Director of MRU’s Centre for Community Disaster Research, and was MRU’s inaugural Board of Governors Research Chair in Resilience & Sustainability. His research focuses on the lived experience of disaster (evacuation, displacement, and return), risk perception, post-disaster environmentalism, climate change denial, mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis, and social inequalities.
Dr. Haney holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Oregon, a Master’s in sociology from Tulane University, and a Bachelor’s degree from Ripon College. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, with his partner and two children.
Dr. Haney (center) with his “Field School in Sociology” class, building homes in a Katrina-affected neighborhood in New Orleans
Hurricane Katrina Articles & Resources
Article from The Sociological Quarterly comparing how different types of social capital intersected with economic inequalities to affect evaluation, displacement, and recovery in the city’s Lower 9th Ward and Lakeview neighborhoods.
Chapter from The Sociology of Katrina, which analyzed the predictors of short-term and longer-term stress following the Katrina disaster. We found that family separation durign evacuation and displacement was one of the most robust predictors of stress, alongside particular demographic characteristics.
This chapter from the book Rethinking Disaster Recovery uses data collected from my Field School students, who spent 3 weeks in New Orleans learning and serving, to look at how students might engage in experiential and service-learning in post-disaster contexts.
In this article with Kristen Barber, we look at the lived experiences and contradictions experienced by sociologists who went through Hurricane Katrina -- schoalrs expected to be detached and objective, yet who have been through a traumatic event and are procesing the emotions of anger and saddness.
Calgary Flood
Articles & Resources
This article published in City & Community looks at the role of developers in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and their continued development of new housing in floodplains following the 2013 flood.
Published in The Conversation, this piece looks at resident perspectives on continued floodplain development in Calgary.
With former student Daran-Gray School, and published in Disasters, this article looks at flooded residents’ lost sense of security in a stable environment and how gender mattered for the disruption of that ontological security.
Using both survey data and geographic (GIS) data, this article looks at how proximity to hazards, and visibility of hazards, intersects with measures of social vulnerability to predict flood risk awareness. With coauthors Daran Gray-Scholz and Pamela MacQuarrie, it was published in Risk Analysis.
From the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, this piece looks at post-disaster plans to return and rebuild or to reloate to different neighborhoods.
This piece from the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters analyzes the pheneomenon of emergent social capital-- soical networks that arise from the disaster itself.
This is the final report from the SSHRC-funded Calgary Flood Study
High River Flood Articles & Resources
With coauthors Caroline McDonald-Harker and Emilie Bassi, we use data from 83 children and youth affected by the 2013 flood in High River, Alberta. Findings suggest that disaster catalyzes a process of reflexivity in children and youth. Experiencing the flood prompted children and youth to think more about the environment than prior to the flood; contemplate larger environmental issues, such as climate change, as the root cause of the locally experienced flood; and take action, as well as call others to action, to ameliorate climate and environmental problems in their own lives and communities. The article appears in Sociological Inquiry.
For this piece in Family Relations, coathors Eva Bogdan, Caroline McDonald-Harker, Emilie Bassi, and I conducted interviews with 105 parents in High River affected by teh flood. We look at coping strategies and family resilience following the flood and find that families who experienced more loss were not necessarily more negatively impacted overall. Those who reported that the flood brought them closer together demonstrated the following three main social skills: (a) communication, (b) conflict resolution, and (c) coping. Findings also reveal that families have higher levels of cohesiveness and resilience post-disaster when they exhibit these important skills.
Pubished in the journal Environmental Sociology, with Caroline McDonald-Harker, this article is based on focus group interviews with 46 residents of High River, Alberta, a rural community hardest hit by the 2013 Southern Alberta flood. Findings suggest that residents voice a contradiction—while they believe that preflood human activity such as deforestation, river diversion, and home building altered the environment and placed communities like their own at risk, they also argue that natural forces such as disasters are immune to human efforts to control them. Residents feel their environment is less stable and predicable since the flood, and they worry more about toxicity and associated environmental health risks.
Fort McMurray Fire
Articles & Resources
This paper, coauthored with Shelley Boulianne and Joanne Minaker, examines Albertans’ response to the wildfire by exploring caring and helping behaviors as well as the role of social media in facilitating these remarkable charitable efforts. The paper uses mixed methods including an analysis of the most popular Tweets related to the wildfire and an Alberta survey collected months after the disaster. The analysis of tweets reveals that care, concern, and invitations to help were prominent in social media discourse about the wildfire. The analysis of survey data demonstrates that those who followed news about the wildfire on social media express higher overall levels of care and concern for those affected, which led to helping those impacted by the wildfire. The findings provide important insights about the role of social media in disaster relief and recovery as well as citizens’ civic engagement.
After the Fire is Out: Coming Home to Fort McMurray
This report, requested by the Emergency Social Services Network of Alberta (ESSNA) during the devastating Fort McMurray Fire, was complied by faculty and staff of the Centre for Community Disaster Research at MRU, with only one day notice. It advised ESSNA and other government agencies on how to plan for resident re-entry following the fire, with a focus on the social and psychological supports that needed to be in place to support affected residents.
Permaculture Articles & Resources
In this article with Aulora Morrow, published in Capitalism Nature Socialism, we use qualitative interview data collected from 56 practicioners of permaculture in Western Canada. They discussion the relatioships between permaculture practice and a capitalist economy. Despite working hard to escapte from global, neoliberal capitalism, they felt trapped. They also, in some cases, reflected upon their participation in ongoing settler colonialism, as well as their economic and racial privilege.
The Seeds of Ecotopia: Permaculture, Risk, and Resilience in Western Canada
Using interview data collected under a grant from SSHRC, Tim interviewed 56 permaculturists in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. In this book manuscript, which he is currently writing, he analyzes their permaculture practice, their understandings of permaculture as a way to address the climate crisis, the tensions between capitalist modes of exchange and permaculture, the ways they see permaculture as mitigating the risk of disasters and crises, and finally, the social movement potential of permaculture.
Environmentalism
Articles & Resources
Using interviews from 40-flood affected residents, I look in this Socius article about how that flood experience changed their environmental views.
With former student Travis Milnes, this Environmental Sociology article looks at men’s resistance to changing environmental views after disaster, and how masculinities matter for this continued complacency.
Gender Differences in Environmentalism Among Students at a Southern University: The Impact of Gender Role Attitudes and University Experience
In this article, we look at gender role attitudes as predictors of enviornmental concern for students at a university in the U.S. South.
D is for Disaster: Lessons of Resilience in Children’s Books
This Contexts piece with Kathryn Wells analyzes children’s book on disaster.
This book chapter from Black Beaches and Bayous: The BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, frames the BP disasater in the context of environmental (in) justice, arguing that the peopel of Louisiana are owed a debt as a result of resource plundering, environmental harms, and the treatement of south Louisiana as an extractive hinterland and sacrifice zone.
COVID Pandemic Articles & Resources
The Extreme Gendering of COVID-19: Household Tasks and Division of Labor Satisfaction During the Pandemic.
With co-author Kristen Barber, the article from Canadian Review of Sociology looks at who did which household tasks during the first three months of the pandemic in Canada. They find that women were many times more likely than men to stay houshold tasks -- like dishes, shopping, and childcaere-- fell mainly on them. For some of the tasks, women reported being as much as ten times more likely to say that the work fell mainly on them. Despite these extreme inequalities, the article finds that this division of tasks did not necessarily translate into greater dissatisfaction with the pandemic division of labor among women.
Might COVID Cause The Collapse of Global Capitalism? With Any Luck, Yes.
This article published on Medium looks at the COVID-related economic recession of Spring 2020, and how that might actually be good for the environment. In it, Tim wrestles with the complex relationship between economic growth and environmental harms as outlined in work coming out of eco-Marxist thought within environmental sociology.
Science, Research Methods & Ethics
Articles & Resources
This article analyzes Calgarians’ denial of the scientific consensus on climate change and ongoign distrust of climate science/scientists
The Experiential Gap in Disaster Research: Feminist Epistemology and the Contribution of Local Affected Researchers
With Kristen Barber, this Sociological Spectrum article presents an epistemological and methdological argument for taking seriously the experiences of researchers impacted by a disaster, contrasting it to dominant “in and out” modes of disaster research.
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This piece, with several coauthors -- all Katrina-affected scholars from New Orleans-- creates space for first-hand accounts and storytelling as a methodological approach to understanding the devastation of Katrina.
In this piece with Bill Lovekamp, we make the case that teaching and learning have often been ignored in disaster research, and instead if we hope to train the next generation of disaster scholars, we must re-center the issue of teahing and learning within our field. It appeared as the Introduction to one of our co-edited issues of International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters.