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The trauma and devastation that resulted from Hurricane Katrina's landfall on August 29, 2005, produced a wide spread public perception of government neglect and ineptitude. Subsequently, a period of nationwide shame and concern for those most affected by the disaster elicited a wave of financial generosity from all social sectors. Yet, by late 2005 the media declared that the majority of Americans had become desensitized to the tragedy and its consequences, coining this shift in public perception as "Katrina fatigue." Thousands of volunteers contradicted this phenomenon, however, by performing service in the devastated city of New Orleans. Long-term volunteers defied "Katrina fatigue" by redirecting the trajectory of their lives so they could provide service. Conventionally accepted volunteer theory predicts that volunteers provide service and that their labor operates in conjunction with institutionally supported mechanisms of security and services. / However, for the volunteer subjects in this study, Katrina and its immediate aftermath shattered the trust in such institutions. These volunteers did not assume that their service operated in conjunction with state sponsored agencies or corporations. Rather, they viewed their own acts of service as the means of promoting the recovery. This qualitative case study examines the deliberated choices and actions performed by long-term volunteers between the years 2005 and 2009. The primary subjects in this investigation include 15 volunteers who performed long-term and/or repeat delegations of service within organized networks. Volunteer subjects believed that if they did not perform the services they did, these services might not get done. Volunteers internalized contours of the larger political economy and their own perceived role within them. Performing service functioned partially to counteract this internalization and simultaneously redirect their lives. / Second Line, a New Orleans street tradition of neighborhood processions, reveals more of what drives the long-term volunteer's desire. The root practice of Second Line processions embodies a form of cognitive liberation for the disenfranchised as the processions interrupt normal arrangements of order and power in the city, albeit temporarily. Volunteers desire to connect with poor and working class Black people in this capacity, and their attempts to do so played out in contexts that sometimes disrupted institutional or corporate power, constituting a demand for change on behalf of Katrina victims. / by Susan D'Aloia. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web. FboU

Thesis. 1975. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / Bibliography: leaves 138-139. / M.C.P.

I use variation in childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, as a natural experiment to explain variation in adult human capital. I also examine a variety of mechanisms by which the Dust Bowl influenced later-life wellbeing, and investigate the scope for recovery from this early-life shock. I find that exposure to the Dust Bowl in childhood has statistically significant and economically meaningful adverse impacts on later-life outcomes, for instance, increasing disability and reducing fertility and college completion. These results hold even after accounting for the possibly confounding effects of the Great Depression, migration, and selective fertility or mortality. The effects I find are more severe for those born in agricultural states, suggesting that the Dust Bowl was most damaging via the destruction of agricultural livelihoods. This collapse of farm incomes, however, had the positive effect of increasing high school completion amongst the exposed, likely by reducing the demand for child farm labor where such labor was not essential to production, and thus decreasing the opportunity costs of secondary schooling; in this outcome, unlike in college completion, family income and student ability were irrelevant. Many of the worst adverse effects are found amongst those exposed prenatally and in early childhood, suggesting that congenital complications in capability development, together with low parental incomes in utero and thereafter, may be to blame for such later-life disadvantage. Together, these findings imply that the Dust Bowl acted largely "indirectly," as an economic shock that in turn affected in utero and early-life conditions, rather than "directly," through personal exposure (e.g. dust inhalation) in childhood. Lastly, results - particularly those on New Deal expenditure - imply both that remediation from early-life disaster is possible under the right circumstances, and that post-shock investment may have compensated for rather than reinforced damage to child endowments. The findings in this study are consistent with a multi-stage model of human capability formation, in which investments in one period respond to endowments in a previous one, and may either reinforce or compensate for these endowments.