Avery Island, Louisiana and McIlhenny Company provide a lens through which to understand how performances of masculinity and paternalism operated in the New South and were deployed for U. S. empire-building projects. Focusing on the tenure of Edward Avery McIlhenny as President of McIlhenny Company, this paper utilizes primary documents from the McIlhenny Company & Avery Island, Inc. Archives to construct a narrative based on correspondence between E. A. and his Wall Street investment banker, Ernest B. Tracy, revealing how E.A. confronted disaster capitalism and influenced the production of cultural tourism amidst environmental and economic crises in the 1920s and 1930s. / text

En Août 2005, l'ouragan Katrina s'est abattu sur la ville de la Nouvelle-Orléans, en Louisiane causant mort, désespoir, angoisse mais aussi destruction massive. Katrina a forcé une partie de la population affectée à déménager, et à chercher refuge dans les états voisins. Face aux premières images de l'une des pires catastrophes des Etats-Unis, la prépondérance des AfricainsAméricains parmi les victimes a été choquante. Katrina a révélé au monde entier et a mis sous les projecteurs la persistance de l'esclavage, du racisme et des inégalités raciales. Les AfricainsAméricains ont dû s'organiser seuls au Superdome et au Convention Center pour sur/vivre. Ce travail de recherche analyse le lien étroit qui existe entre les notions de «race» de classe et la géographie. Nous examinerons les concepts hautement controversés de « refugiés » et de « pilleurs» dans le contexte américain. Nous chercherons à comprendre comment l'histoire et le racisme peuvent influencer les comportements et les décisions politiques. Etait-ce une catastrophe naturelle, un désastre créé par l'humain ou une crise héritée de legs culturels? La culture et la race ont été les facteurs principaux de cette tragédie. Nous traiterons de cette catastrophe non pas comme un simple phénomène cyclonique mais comme un évènement culturel. La culture a successivement condamné et sauvé les Africains-Américains en 2005. Le jazz, le blues et le hip-hop ont été de véritables atouts suite à Katrina. Les Africains-Américains ont utilisé ces genres musicaux afin d'exprimer leur chagrin et colère. L'écriture est devenue une véritable thérapie assimilée à une catharsis. Grâce à cela, ils ont pu dire non à une annihilation programmée / In August 2005, hurricane Katrina made landfall on the city of New-Orleans, Louisiana causing not only death, despair, anguish but also massive destruction and subsequent relocation. As the catastrophe made headlines worldwide, people were shocked by the overwhelming preponderance of the African American poor among those stranded within the city. Many explained the disproportion as a result of continual neglect. The devastation left by Katrina brought to light the enduring legacy of slavery, racism and racial inequality. African Americans were left alone to fend for themselves at the Superdome and at the Convention Center. This doctoral research provides an insight into the correlation between race, class and geography. We will explore the highly controversial concepts of "the refuge(s)" and "looters" in the US context. We will try to figure out how history and cultural racism influence behaviors and political decisions. Was Katrina a natural catastrophe, a man-made disaster or a cultural crisis? Besides race, culture seems to be a major component in this tragedy. We delve into this analysis from the framework of cultural studies. On the one hand, culture condemned African-Americans in 2005, but on the other hand, it put them out of harm's way. Jazz, blues and hip-hop became serious assets in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. African-Americans used these musical genres to express grief and anger. They used writing as a powerful tool to recover from Katrina. Jazz, blues and hip-hop proved to be synonymous with catharsis

Just and equitable responses to the disparate impacts of climate change on communities and individuals throughout the world are at the heart of the concept of climate justice. Commodification, in the context of my research, is the process of monetizing nature and livelihoods for the purpose of surplus accumulation and profit maximization. In this study, my aim was to contextualize the concepts of climate injustice, disaster capitalism, and the commodification of lives and livelihoods in the specific setting of disaster vulnerability in southwest coastal Bangladesh. By conducting a case study in Kamarkhola and Sutarkhali regions of southwest coastal Bangladesh, I utilized discourse analysis and content analysis of livelihood interviews, semi-structured interviews, and policy documents to demonstrate the conceptual interrelation among global climate change, climate injustice, disaster capitalism, and capitalist expansion in environmentally precarious areas. I argue that in Southwest Coastal Bangladesh, the vulnerability to disasters stems from a complex and multifaceted layer of social hierarchies and inequalities, entwined with factors such as class and power relations. I also argue that Inequalities in the political, economic, and social realms have a key role in imposing vulnerability on disadvantaged people living in ecologically vulnerable areas. The perpetuation of inequality is sustained by the expansion and accumulation of capital through the dispossession and exploitation of natural resources. The existing approaches to climate change adaptation in the southwest coastal region of Bangladesh are deeply entrenched in neoliberal capitalism. The introduction of neoliberal economic policies, such as the privatization of state lands and the promotion of export-oriented aquaculture, created favorable conditions for capitalist expansion in environmentally vulnerable places through "accumulation by dispossession."

With many countries in Black Africa immersed in external debts and yet others grappling with effects of civil wars and pandemics, social services such as basic education and primary health care pose challenges to them. To mitigate such shortcomings in the region, innovative ways to provide basic education are sought by the private sector. To meet the goals of education for all, national governments fall short of alternatives which gives rise to options like low fee private schools (LFPSs). But these innovative ways which are basically home-grown have got foreign competitors who provide the same basic education services. This thesis does not address the element of competition; rather it explores latest global changes that affect almost all aspects of social life – particularly basic education. This thesis looks at the public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education with low fee private schools (LFPSs) as one of the ‘innovative’ ways of providing basic education; this has had an effect of having entire basic education systems contracted out by national governments in the region. With weak public service systems, how can Black Africa implement PPPs with LFPSs? Using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis – theory and method as well as operationalised space-times theory by Harvey (1990), this thesis probed PPPs with LFPSs in Liberia. The objectives were to understand the nature of educational reforms advocated in PPPs with LFPSs and to examine the kind of relationship between government and private sector service providers in PPPs with a view of locating the power within such relationships. Another objective was to probe how equitable and inclusive these basic education services provided by PPPs with LFPSs were. The study revealed that PPPs with LFPSs are implicated in denying access to the rural communities, limiting equitable and inclusive education to many social groups like the poor, girls and people with disabilities as well as seeming to undermine national and local governments due to power and ideology.

The rising number of disasters, both natural and man-made, has created a greater need for humanitarian interventions. Simultaneously, it has also created larger room for disaster capitalism, a phenomenon where certain actors use disasters to push economic interests. NGO:s are one of the main actors in post-disaster settings, which happens to be the very same sphere as the one where disaster capitalism occurs. Thus, this study will examine how NGO:s can work to counteract disaster capitalism. This is done by looking at how Swedish NGO:s implement their work and whether this is compatible with Loretta Pyles’ decolonising disaster social work framework (2017), which is deemed to contain measures which can hamper disaster capitalism. Furthermore, it also delves into NGO perception of privatisation of the humanitarian sector, which consociates with disaster capitalism, which is done by looking at how Swedish NGO:s experience the expansion of privatisations into the humanitarian sphere. The methodology is based on semi-structured interviews with representatives from a number of Swedish NGO:s active in the humanitarian sector, from which data has been qualitatively analysed. The results show, among other things, that disaster capitalism as a concept is fairly unknown among most of the NGO:s, however central aspects are recognised by many. It also shows that Swedish NGO:s are generally in line with Pyles’ framework. The dilemmas of the localisation agenda are examined, where the ambitions are high but institutional barriers hamper movement in its direction. Similarly, the pros and cons of international standards are discussed and whether these are a barrier to localisation. Resilience and the humanitarian-development nexus are highly contemporary matters and are also debated. The position towards private actors and privatisations of the humanitarian sector is contradictive, as there is a general opinion that being private and for-profit is not a problem, but also a general opinion that actors have to work on a principle-basis and not to make profit. It became clear that some scepticism is levelled at private actors from an NGO perspective. Finally, critical aspects of the humanitarian system and potential future risks are discussed, with the main concern regarding a phasing out of Western NGO:s in favour for less principle-based actors from other parts of the world.

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Natural disasters are uniquely transformative events. They can drastically transform physical terrain and the lives of those unfortunate enough to be caught in their wrath. However, natural disasters also provide an opportunity to reflect on past failures and, at times, a clean slate to correct those shortcomings. This project takes a political economic approach and recognizes natural disasters as occasions for agenda-setting on behalf of transnational commercial enterprises and market-oriented policy elites. These reformers often use the post-disaster policy space to articulate long-term development strategies based on market fundamentalism, and, more importantly, advance a set of policies consistent with their particular interests. This dissertation delves into that process and identifies the actors, their preferences and the policy outcomes. Using the business conflict model alongside changing transnational processes, this project identifies and traces post-disaster policy making in the Caribbean Basin. It also explores and provides a more nuanced explanation of its effect upon and within certain socioeconomic groups. What becomes apparent is that natural disasters are opportunities to first fracture national economies and then integrate them into transnational processes of capital accumulation. Given that economic viability is increasingly determined by assimilation into the global production processes, reformers in both developed and developing countries use disasters as occasions for re-orienting national economies towards this end. It is within this distorted integrative process that disaster capitalism is located.

No description available.

Abstract Amidst the worst disaster to impact a major U.S. city in one hundred years, New Orleans’ main trauma and safety net medical center, the Reverend Avery C. Alexander Charity Hospital, was permanently closed. Charity’s administrative operator, Louisiana State University (LSU), ordered an end to its attempted reopening by its workers and U.S. military personnel in the weeks following the August 29, 2005 storm. Drawing upon rigorous review of literature and an exhaustive analysis of primary and secondary data, this case study found that Charity Hospital was closed as a result of disaster capitalism. LSU, backed by Louisiana state officials, took advantage of the mass internal displacement of New Orleans’ populace in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in an attempt to abandon Charity Hospital’s iconic but neglected facility and to supplant its original safety net mission serving the poor and uninsured for its neoliberal transformation to favor LSU’s academic medical enterprise.