Rebecca Elliott - Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States

Writing a book is in many ways an unavoidably solitary task, but for me it has not been a lonely one. Any faults you may find with the book are my responsibility, but my work has benefited immeasurably from the assistance, support, feedback, and patience of so many people, and finishing this book gives me the opportunity to thank them.

First, I owe my deepest gratitude to the many people in New York City, New Jersey, Washington, DC, and elsewhere, who shared their stories, expertise, opinions, and feelings as I pursued answers to my research questions. I thank them for their time, candor, and trust. To those I met who were recovering from Hurricane Sandy, I am so humbled and grateful for the invitations into your homes. Even though those homes may not have lived up to your standards, or yet felt presentable for guests, they were spaces of such kindness and care to me. I owe special thanks to Joseph Pupello and David Gaul of Zone A New York, Amy Bach of United Policyholders, and Carolyn Nagy and Matthew Hassett of the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, who invited me to turn my research findings into materials that might help Hurricane Sandyaffected residents, exposing me to the power and importance of public sociology. I also thank Katherine Greig, with the New York City Mayors Office of Recovery and Resiliency, who was always keen to share ideas and to discuss really complex questions about the future of New York City.

This book began as my PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley. There I benefited from the tremendous intellectual firepower of my faculty advisors and fellow graduate students. Marion Fourcade provided indispensable guidance and encouragement as not only the chair of my dissertation committee, but as a mentor through the entirety of graduate school and beyond. She showed incredible trust and patience when I would come into her office to riff about my semiformed ideas and she believed in the project, and in me, the whole way. My intellectual development generally, and this project specifically, have benefited enormously from her ability to be simultaneously demanding and kind. Neil Fligstein kept me tethered to the big questions when I went wading into the weeds of flood insurance history and administration, helping me always to think about the more broadly sociological significance of my research. I am grateful for his attention and interest. Cal Morrill taught me how to do qualitative research. He let fifteen-minute meetings stretch to take up the better part of an hour and provided careful feedback on drafts, which was precious to me. He helped me to distill my sprawling ideas, and his creativity inspired me at every turn. I always left his office excited to keep working. I am also grateful to Arlie Hochschild, who took me on as a research assistant on her own project about environmental peril, but who always took time out of our meetings to ask about how my work was going. Working for her was a master class in conducting and writing up research from a place of earnest curiosity and empathy. At Berkeley, I was also helped along through my participation in several workshops with faculty members and my fellow graduate students. Heather Haveman, Anne Swidler, and Cihan Tugal provided comments on work in progress, as well as valuable advice, in those settings. I am grateful to Alex Roehrkasse, Ben Shestakofsky, Roi Livne, Katherine Hood, Beth Pearson, Jonah Stuart Brundage, Jacob Habinek, Daniel Kluttz, Sarah Macdonald, Herbert Docena, Sunmin Kim, Gowri Vijayakumar, Carter Koppelman, Ryan Calder, Carlos Bustamante, Megan Peppel, Peter Ekman, and Caleb Scoville. All of them read and responded to early drafts, or listened to me present them, and they were wonderful friends to me besides.

If I left an intellectually supportive community behind at Berkeley, it was only to join another at the London School of Economics, where the project of writing this book began. I have been privileged to have as mentors Bridget Hutter and Nigel Dodd, who were excited about this book and gave me useful guidance as I worked on it. In our departmental writing group and in conversations over coffee, I received indispensable feedback and advice on the book proposal, chapter drafts, and revisions from Fabien Accominotti, Carrie Friese, Sam Friedman, Liene Ozolina-Fitzgerald, Monika Krause, Sara Salem, Jeremy Brice, Alexander Dobeson, Jonathan Mijs, Ioanna Gouseti, and Leon Wansleben, along with a fabulous crew of our PhD students. I have also learned by the example of my colleagues, as Ive engaged with their research and seen their own projects come to fruition. I am also thankful for the support Ive received from my affiliations with the LSEs Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, the LSE US Centre, and the Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation. All of these research centers gave me opportunities to share my work in progress.