Browsing by Subject "New Orleans"
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Item Barriers to and opportunities for commercial urban farming : case studies from Austin, Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana(2014-05) Vickery, Kathryn Koebert; Dooling, SarahThis professional report addresses 1) where urban agriculture is developing in cities and why; 2) the primary constraints affecting the development of long-term commercial urban farm operations within the boundaries of large metropolitan cities; and 3) how cities are planning and creating policies for commercial urban agriculture under different environmental, economic, and land-use constraints. Using case studies from Austin, Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana, I address these questions through a qualitative analysis of current efforts to reform land use policies for urban farming, existing literature, and interviews with practitioners, farmers, policy makers, and planners. The history and context of each case study is addressed, honing in on specific environmental, social, regulatory, economic, and land use barriers to commercial urban farming.Item The body rockers : New Orleans "Sissy” Bounce and the politics of displacement(2013-12) Chapman, Alix Andrew; Smith, Christen A., 1977-; Costa-Vargas, Joao H.; Gordon, Edmund T.; Jones, Omi Joni L.; Gill, Lyndon; Allen, Jafari S.This dissertation in an ethnographic analysis of the ways in which black cultural performance is mobilized to produce and maintain social relationships and space in times of economic and sociocultural displacement. New Orleans Bounce music is a dynamic cultural performance of locality and blackness that prompts conflicting debates about the meaning of identity, place, and cultural heritage in “post-Katrina” New Orleans. Focusing on “Sissy” Bounce, an emergent subgenre defined by sexuality and gender, I investigate its significance as an expression of blackness marked by deviance within the socio-historical context of "post-Katrina" New Orleans. Specifically, the project frames “Sissy” Bounce as a cultural medium for the production of black space in a time of crisis, and argues that Bounce's symbolic form frames "queerness" as a tool of survival for young black people facing the politics of displacement, disorientation, and disaster. The quick rise of Bounce to national popularity has made it representational of the deviant black dancing body within the national imagination. Consequently, this dissertation also asks how these dances and representations effect meanings of blackness at home and throughout the nation? What does the resonance of “Sissy” Bounce in New Orleans and among its diaspora tell us about the political significance of queerness and displacement as nodal points of the contemporary black experience in the United States? The “Sissy” Bounce music scene’s ubiquity points to the resilience of black people living on the margins of family, community, and nation.Item Creating a sustainable preservation hybrid in post-Katrina New Orleans(2009-05) Stanard, Lorna Michelle; Holleran, MichaelThe two fields of historic preservation and sustainable design include many similar values concerning conservation, yet produce buildings that ultimately look and perform differently. Historic preservation relies on the maintenance of traditional materials to ensure that historic buildings are preserved for future generations. Sustainable design typically works with new construction to create buildings that have little negative impact on the environment. The similarities yet separateness that exist between historic preservation and sustainable design provide a compelling platform to ask how we can combine the two fields within one building project. The combination of these two felds is currently being explored in post-Katrina New Orleans, and I am asking how we can combine historic preservation with aspects of sustainable design to create a sustainable preservation hybrid, or fusion between technological aspects of “green” design with traditional methods of preservation, that will allow historic buildings to maintain their integrity and achieve the values of sustainability. New Orleans provides a great opportunity to examine this question due to the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing efforts to rebuild the city. One specific area of New Orleans, the historic district of Holy Cross, plays home to two key organizations involved in the rebuilding: the Preservation Resource Center, which preserves the existing historic housing stock, and Global Green, which builds new, sustainable design projects. These two organizations work right down the street from one another, yet have yet to combine their building methods or work together on a shared project. This relationship between Global Green/sustainable design and the Preservation Resource Center/historic preservation provides a good opportunity to examine how elements of new sustainable design can be combined with the traditional methods of preservation in order to achieve a sustainable preservation hybrid. I examine the creation of a sustainable preservation hybrid by conducting a literature review, interviews and site visits, and energy modeling. The literature review reveals that preservationists and architects involved with sustainable design like the idea of creating a hybrid, but still lack a thorough understanding of each other’s tacit values. The interviews reveal how the organizations working in Holy Cross also embrace the idea of a sustainable preservation hybrid, yet remain somewhat lost as to how to actually create such a building. The energy modeling then demonstrates which combination of “green” materials from sustainable design and “traditional” materials from historic preservation combine to create a building that achieves both the values of sustainable design and historic preservation. Whether or not we can combine preservation and sustainable design to make a hybrid poses an original and relevant question in the context of post-Katrina New Orleans and elsewhere. Since we are currently facing an energy crisis, the conclusions as to how we can combine these two fields prove how a single, historic building can simultaneously conserve both environmental and historic resources.Item I am pouring sweet water on my altar for you : theorizing women of color feminism at the junctures of storm/water, femininity, race and power(2015-05) Gunasena, Natassja Bindu; Tinsley, Omise'eke Natasha, 1971-; Tang, EricThis thesis is a meditation on the womanness of water and the wateriness of black and brown womannness. It begins with a consideration of those women that were swept away in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Sri Lanka and those women who were engulfed by the rage of Hurricane Katrina nine months later. As such, this thesis is also a consideration of waterscapes of origin, of the pitfalls and potentials of women of color connecting through, with and as water. It names Yemoja, Oshun, Erzulie, Pattini and Viharamahadevi as theories of water, gender and race developed by women whose lives are "writ in water", and it names them as flesh-and-blood women who wrest/ed meaning from materiality. And finally, this thesis is my own praxis of "crossing", my response to M.Jacqui Alexander's call to "water the plantain shoots" and to remember what we have forgotten we've forgotten. It is a navigation of the waters of women of color feminism, anchored first and always in Black feminism, that hopes to a chart a new future where the bridge isn’t only our back, but our hands, our tongues, and our hearts.Item The impotent toolkit : challenges and limitations of co-design for societal value in Southeast Louisiana's landscapes of African American dispossession(2015-05) McDowell, Robin Boeun; Lee, Gloria; Tang, Eric; Lewis, RandolphThis report details a reflexive practice that lies in the emerging field of co-design for societal value. This territory marks a move from user participation to equal empowerment of stakeholders--that is, designers, users, and other project constituents defining objectives and working through design processes together via a shared vision for more just and sustainable ways of living. The body of design work examined in this report is a combination of traditional products of graphic design, participatory design methods, and ethnography. Initiated around a physically demolished and institutionally repressed history of enslaved Africans in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, the value of this work is not found in formal qualities of designed objects or in a groundbreaking process model, but in detailed documentation of consistent reflection on the role of the designer as outsider. This broadened analysis offers an expansion of the repertoire of co-design case studies.Item A jungle of anxious desires : representing New Orleans, 1880–2005(2009-05) Watts, Tracey Ann; Carter, Mia; Bremen, Brian A.New Orleans has been the subject of a narrative of exoticization throughout much of its history as an American space. The dominant trend in representation casts this city as a lush site of strangeness, intercultural confusion, enchantment, and, occasionally, an alternatively transformative or annihilative freedom. My project travels across genres and critical frameworks to explore the history and development of the narrative of New Orleans’ exoticism in literary and public discourse. The narrative’s evocative rhetoric, including the frequent appearance of the term “jungle,” and its emphasis on both charm and degeneracy encode larger doubts over the ability of the city to fit national ideals. These codes draw on a negative racial imaginary and manifest as sentiments of anxiety and desire over the crossing of nationally normative racial and sexual boundaries. Although the generative position of the narrative has gone largely unrecognized, it surfaces in multiple contexts and in concert with larger discursive trends, such as 19th century interests in racially exclusive American nationalism and 20th century fears of a racialized, sexualized other. This project pays particular attention to the articulations of the narrative in George Washington Cable’s novel The Grandissimes and in the New Orleans-based works of Tennessee Williams. It also explores challenges to the narrative offered by contemporary poets Brenda Marie Osbey and Joy Harjo. Additionally, it investigates the recycling of the narrative in contemporary political discourse.Item Ownership, engagement, and entrepreneurship : the gens de couleur libres and the architecture of antebellum New Orleans, 1820-1850(2012-12) Dudley, Tara Ann; Long, Christopher (Christopher Alan), 1957-; Cleary, Richard Louis; Holleran, Michael; Walker, Juliet E.; Edwards, Jay D."Ownership, Engagement, and Entrepreneurship: the gens de couleur libres and the Architecture of Antebellum New Orleans, 1820-1850" examines the architectural activities of New Orleans' gens de couleur libres, or free people of color, and the historical, cultural, and economic implications of their contributions to nineteenth-century American architecture. Specifically, this dissertation explores the histories of two black Creole families engaged in the building trades and real estate in the antebellum New Orleans, emphasizing their activities as a process of building culture that created and supported ethnic and architectural identity on individual and communal levels. The years from 1820 to 1850 saw New Orleans become an important American metropolis and industrialized commercial center. Changes in architecture included the introduction of East Coast urban forms, the introduction of Federal and Greek Revival styles, and professionalization of the building trades and the role of the architect. The antebellum period provides a challenging framework in which to the view the architecture-related accomplishments of New Orleans' gens de couleur libres. They faced a paradoxical situation where the stability of New Orleans' economy and racial hierarchies could positively or negatively affect their success in building as well as owning and developing property. Still the gens de couleur libres' investments thrived as racial separation was becoming increasingly strict and enabled the gens de couleur libres to retain black and Creole control in the city. The members of the Dolliole and Soulié families were key players as builders, owners, and speculators. The gens de couleur libres contact with the built environment created a process of ownership, engagement, and entrepreneurship through which they established, maintained, and underscored their individual and community identities. This process forms the foundation for the organization of the dissertation and invites analysis of the meaning of the gens de couleur libres' influence on New Orleans' antebellum architecture on several levels: social meaning as architecture affected the welfare and relations of the community of free people of color; cultural meaning as architecture pertained to, and was derived from, the artistic and intellectual pursuits of the gens de couleur libres and transmitted from one generation to the next; and socio-economic meaning as architecture affected the production, distribution, and use of wealth for individuals and in the gens de couleur libres community at large. Approaching the study of architecture through a set of diverse lenses including social networks and real estate speculation alongside building design and construction, this dissertation interjects the legacy of the gens de couleur libres into American architectural history.Item Remembering the ritual : exploring The other side of shadow(2010-08) Faia, Anthony Nicholas; Kelban, Stuart; Thorne, BeauThe following report documents the evolution of the script The Other Side of Shadow and the effects that extensive rewriting, character work, and story restructuring have had on the author.Item Sacred devotion or shameless promotion? : modern Voodoo in New Orleans(2013-05) Ainsworth, Kelli Suzanne; Todd, Russell; Dawson, Kate Winkler; Minutaglio, WilliamVoodoo has become a marketing tool for New Orleans. The city is inundated with Voodoo shops and curios and businesses and sports teams that incorporate Voodoo in their names. Visitors to New Orleans believe having a reading with a Voodoo practitioner is an authentic experience of an important aspect of the city’s culture and history. Today, while Voodoo is still all over New Orleans, it faces many challenges. Most of the cultural understandings about Voodoo are incorrect. People forget that Voodoo is an actual religion. They often see it as a sinister system of spells and magic used for nefarious purposes, which relies on the aid of evil spirits. The truth is, Voodoo is an old religion, still practiced today that includes, but doesn’t consist wholly, of esoteric elements. Practitioners don’t seek to do harm, but to help. Most Voodoo rituals held in New Orleans today are performed in order to petition the spirits to protect the city from social and environmental forces that threaten it. There’s also an ongoing debate about what “authentic” Voodoo consists of. Some believe that Voodoo is ancestral, that it’s in your blood and you can’t convert to it. Therefore, they believe, white practitioners are misguided at best and con-artists at worst. Others maintain that Voodoo is fluid, evolving religion and it can be whatever a person wants it to be. They believe that anyone who is sincere can connect with the spirits and seek their help.Item "There are some bad brothers and sisters in New Orleans" : the Black Power movement in the Crescent City from 1964-1977(2011-12) Camara, Samori Sekou; Moore, Leonard N. (Leonard Nathaniel); Walker, Juliet; Brands, H W.; Harrison, Louis; Allen, TroyThis is a study of the manifestations and permutations of the Black Power era principles and ideologies in New Orleans from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. By highlighting little-known and often neglected groups along with popular organizations, this work illuminates how these groups shaped and rethought the their objectives and tactics in the contested terrain of post-Civil Rights New Orleans. Making extensive use of archival resources, newspaper articles, memoirs, interviews, and secondary literature, “There are Some Bad Brothers and Sisters in New Orleans” focuses on the ways in which disparate organizations, groups, and individuals, wrestling with the highly fluid idea of Black Power, attempted to refashion the political and cultural landscape of the Crescent City. This dissertation contributes a more nuanced analysis of this famous city and continues the recent surge in Black Power Studies that emphasizes local examples of Black Power. This work tells the story of New Orleans; of shootouts and showdowns; liberation theater and war helicopters; schools and southern political rules. The central objective of this study is to provide a more complete and in-depth look at the major themes (Cultural Nationalism, Revolutionary Nationalism, Black Arts, student movements, political power, and independent education) of the Black Power era by calling attention to its distinctive but informative examples nurtured in the incomparable city of New Orleans. This dissertation argues that the roots of Black Power in New Orleans were shattered, disparate, and ad-hoc in nature. As such, its thrust failed to bear the social, cultural, economic, and political fruit hoped for by its advocates.Item The use of GIS for hazard mitigation for historic resources(2011-05) Cynkar, Grace Alexandra; Holleran, Michael; Penick, Monica Michelle, 1972-; Scott, RodGeographical Information Systems (GIS) offers preservationists a unique tool with the potential to revolutionize hazard mitigation for historic resources. The program’s ability to link information to a specific geographical location and efficiently disperse this information can solve two of the most destructive issues of current natural disaster response practices: a lack of organized information and an efficient means of disseminating this data. The resources necessary to implement a GIS program and to the requisite cooperation between both public and private preservation organizations may seem prohibitive to many preservation programs; yet, the benefits make this initial investment cost-effective. Despite efforts to mitigate disasters, both natural and man-made, their effects constantly threaten historic resources. In the past two decades, the United States has made significant strides toward a greater protection of these sites; yet damage continues to occur. In this thesis, I have investigated methods of risk mitigation implemented in the United States at both the state and local level, and in the public and private sectors, using New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as a case study. Through this analysis, I discovered that a lack of accessible, organized information and cooperation between preservationists compounded the damage caused by the actual event itself. I argue that the implementation of GIS could solve many of these issues by providing a means of both consolidating data and distributing it among responders. In this work, I demonstrate the ability of GIS to easily solve the problems of current mitigation practices for historic resources. By discussing the tools and basic functions of the program, I clearly illustrate this utility to those unfamiliar with the program, while arguing its potential as a mitigation implement to all preservationists.Item Whole wild creation : an examination of the Mardi Gras Indian culture of New Orleans(2010-05) Reno, Linda A., 1981-; Darling, Dennis Carlyle; Reed, EllisThe Mardi Gras Indian culture of New Orleans, Louisiana is a unique tradition that blends African spirituality, Caribbean spirituality, African music and dance, with Native American style dress. The Mardi Gras Indians engage in ritual battle and ancestor worship as a part of their tradition of using cultural expression as a means for social protest. While many tourists to the Crescent City may have the opportunity to witness the Indians in full dress, even few native New Orleanians ever learn the depth of the phenomenon.