This presentation examines the historical trajectory and contemporary dismantling of the United States’ “sympathetic state”—a welfare architecture that has long provided disaster relief as a core component of social provision, embedded in a moral economy of deservingness and deeply intertwined with asset-based welfare and property ownership. The presentation builds on histories of the welfare state that have connected disaster relief to welfare state development, and traces this imbrication through the course of the 20th century and the disaster safety net that developed.

Today, this system faces unprecedented strain. Climate disasters threaten the stability of housing markets, while recent policy reversals signal an ideological retreat from federal responsibility. These shifts raise critical questions: How will fiscal constraints and political projects reshape the state’s obligation to citizens in distress? Will disaster relief continue to reinforce property-based inequalities, or can alternative models of housing and redistribution emerge?

By situating current developments within a long history of welfare and property politics, this talk explores the stakes of dismantling the disaster safety net amid intensifying climate risk and deepening social inequality.
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Speaker bio: Rebecca Elliott is Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she is also affiliated with the Grantham Research Institute and the Phelan US Centre. Her research examines the intersections of environmental change and economic life, as they appear across public policy, administrative institutions, and everyday practice. She is author of Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2021), which was the co-winner for the 2022 Viviana Zelizer Book Award from the Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and received an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Alice Amsden Book Award from the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. In addition to publishing in academic journals, she has contributed to The New York Times, The Houston Chronicle, and Harper’s Magazine. Rebecca is one of the editors of The British Journal of Sociology.
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Booking is required for people outside of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI). DSPI Members do not need to register.