I argue that to understand the gender dynamics of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, and the storm's aftermath, one must interrogate the cultural conflation of the black female body and the city's legacy to explore what it means and how it situates real black women in social, cultural, and physical landscapes. Using a hybrid theoretical framework informed by Black feminist theory, ecocriticism, critical race feminism, and post-positivist realism, I explore the connections between New Orleans' cultural and historical discourses that gender the city as feminine, more specifically as a black woman or Jezebel, with narratives of real black females to illustrate the impact that dominant discourses have on people's lives. I ground this work in Black feminism, specifically Hortense Spillers's and Patricia Hill Collins's works that center the black female body to garner a fuller understanding of social systems, Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality, and Evelyn Hammonds's call for a reclamation of the body to interrogate the ideologies that inscribe black women. In addition, I argue that black women should reclaim New Orleans' metaphorical black body and interrogate this history to move forward in rebuilding the city. As an ecocritic and feminist, I understand the tension involved with reading a city as feminine and arguing for this reclamation, as this echoes colonial and imperialist discourses of conquering land and bodies, but I negotiate these tensions by specifically examining the discourse itself to expose the sexist and racist ideologies at work. / Master of Arts

Thesis (M.S.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Psychology. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Speech Communication, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 84-95).

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Geography, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

March 11, 2011 Earthquake in Japan and 2005 Hurricane Katrina both caused significant destruction and were both viewed as examples of government failures in natural disaster management. One year after the disasters, both countries enacted several policy reforms in response to their failures. However, while in the U.S, the central government's emergency power was strengthened, the DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan)'s government carried out reforms to strengthen the local governments. On the other hand, the other prominent political party in Japan, the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party), argued for more centralized power. How did these parties take different lessons from the natural disasters? This paper will first analyze the factors that led to government failures in the disaster relief period, and then evaluate the most influential factors that led to the policy reforms. Eventually, we would be able to figure out the exact factors that led the U.S, the DPJ and the LDP to their conclusions.

The creative nonfiction essays and poetry in this collection explore family survival during the hardest of times--when the desire to give up is at its greatest--as told from the perspective of a woman who is a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother. These are not stories of defeat. Nor are they merely explorations of death and dying. They are cleebrations of living, of surviving, of loving and being loved against all odds.

Cause lawyers maintain primary commitments to causes and pursue political and moral objectives that go well beyond the traditional lawyering objective of client service, which is the goal of most conventional lawyers. In this research I conduct in-depth interviews with cause lawyers involved in efforts for social change in post-Katrina New Orleans to develop a richer understanding of their roles within social movements and how they conceive of and negotiate the core tensions in their work. I investigate the lawyers' roles within social movements situated in legal, political and social climates that are overwhelmingly inhospitable to their ultimate goals. Ultimately, this research presents a portrait of cause lawyers who develop alternative modes of practice that are more commonly associated with movement organizers and more closely aligned with movement goals of individual and community empowerment than are traditional models of lawyering.

Samba drumming and dance traditions work in New Orleans in ways that they do not elsewhere. Casa Samba, a drumming and dance troupe in the tradition of the Brazilian escolas de samba, shows how it works. Integral to this analysis of Casa Samba are the ways in which the group's identity and the identities of its individual members are processual, mutable, and "unfinished, always being remade" (Gilroy 1993:xi). This thesis examines how Casa Samba has situated itself in the New Orleans music scene. This work seeks, through ethnographic interviews with long term members, to identify what makes Casa Samba attractive to New Orleanians who choose to join this musical troupe as opposed to the myriad of other musical organizations available. Finally, this thesis looks at Casa Samba's post-Katrina rebirth and the ways in which the group's willingness to continuously evolve throughout its history has made this rebirth possible.

Dubbed the "most murderous" and "deadliest" city in the United States during 2006, 2007 and 2008, New Orleans has wrestled with crime and murder since its founding in 1718. Following Hurricane Katrina the city saw an increase in the murder rate despite a sharp decrease in population. The focus of this project was to map homicide data trends in the city of New Orleans over a period of seven years, 2002 to 2008, and compare spatial and temporal patterns via GIS. NOPD homicide location data were geocoded and analyzed in ESRI's ArcGIS geospatial software. Methodologies of hotspot detection included point maps, choropleth graduated color maps, and quartic kernel density maps. The project's goal was to not only detect hotspots, but to create a synoptic view of shifting homicide trends throughout the city of New Orleans, highlighting the impact of Hurricane Katrina.