New Orleans is one of the most culturally unique cities in America. However, amidst its rich history and lively traditions, there exists extreme poverty and violence. The objective conditions of New Orleans such as poverty, unemployment, violence, poor healthcare, segregation, inadequate housing, drugs, and racism have created a cycle of despair that many in New Orleans cannot escape. These conditions are not isolated in New Orleans but reproduced and reinforced through the basic structure of American society, governmental and institutional policies, and ideologies. While all poor residents in New Orleans internalize and shape the oppression and marginalization they experience on a daily basis, some New Orleans residents have redefined the limitations, oppression, and exclusion they experience through violence, drugs, and a destructive lifestyle. The values, beliefs, ideals, and behaviors of these residents are often in direct opposition to mainstream culture. While only a small percentage of individuals in New Orleans embrace this type of lifestyle, their actions have powerful and influential effects on all residents in New Orleans. Throughout New Orleans, there are numerous community organizations that work to alleviate the conditions of poverty and provide outreach to at-risk youth. This research critically examines and evaluates the philosophies and community development efforts of three faith-based organizations in New Orleans. These faith-based organizations in New Orleans are Trinity Christian Community, Urban Impact Ministries, and Desire Street Ministries. All three organizations are part of the Christian Community Development Movement, a national Christian movement dedicated to bringing the love of Christ to poor communities across the nation. The structure and mission of these organizations is shaped by their conservative Christian theologies and critical interpretation of the Bible. This research examines the ways ministers and staff at these organizations use Christian spirituality in their outreach and community development programs for youth in some of New Orleans poorest communities. The research also examines how the complex concepts of race and community impact the community development approaches of these organizations.

Tchula period pottery (Tchefuncte culture) in Louisiana is characterized by highly contorted and laminated pastes. These diagnostic traits have led investigators to suggest hypotheses concerning manufacturing techniques, but there has been relatively little focus on temporal trends associated with these characteristics. The first step in redressing this problem was to identify a site likely to contain archaeological assemblages that would span the Tchula period. Excavations began at the Sarah Peralta site (16EBR67) in the fall of 2001 and were concluded in the spring of 2002. Artifacts from this site were characterized according to standard identification procedures. A secondary site, the Bayou Jasmine site (16SJB2), was chosen for comparative purpose to isolate temporal or geographic variation in Tchefuncte pottery. Pottery from the two sites, the Sarah Peralta site (16EBR67) and the Bayou Jasmine site (16SJB2), was analyzed to test the hypothesis that the quality of Tchula pottery improves temporally when frequency of contortions and laminations are calculated and compared. These questions were contextualized within a wider view of Louisiana's first pottery, its production, and adoption throughout the southeast United States. The results suggest laminations and contortions change in frequency and degree temporally and possibly spatially, or according to site function, giving researchers a new method for seriating pottery from the period.

Our understanding of urban effects on local climate remains unsatisfactory due to several difficulties: 1) the inherent complexity of the city-atmosphere system, 2) lack of a clear conceptual theoretical framework for inquiry, and 3) the high expense and enormous difficulties of acquiring a sufficient quantity of high-quality, high-resolution (both spatially and temporally) observations in cities. Using remotely-sensed data, this study analyzes urban heat islands (UHI) that are manifested through an elevation in the surface thermal emissions within urban regions known as surface heat islands (SHI). The study area for this research endeavor is Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Whereas the surface air temperature-derived UHI did not portray an accurate representation of distinct changes in surface temperature across the study area, the remotely-sensed surface temperature-derived SHI proved to reveal microscale differences that the surface air temperature-derived UHI was unable to depict. This study also provided verification that altering amounts of vegetation within a given land cover over time can reveal changes in surface temperature values, thus providing a means to reconstruct and predict future SHIs. This was achieved through regression equations predicting surface temperatures from known NDVI values. Finally, the moist static energy parameter was evaluated to test for a better indicator of the UHI over time throughout the study area. A decreasing temporal trend in MSE was identified throughout the study period (1988 - 2003) whereas no significant linear trend occurred in air temperature. This is supported by change detection rates generated from a comparison of the 1988 and 2003 LANDSAT data sets, as well as the range in 1988 and 2003 predicted surface temperatures (as a function of land cover).

There are numerous ways to estimate postmortem interval (PMI), or time since death, including body temperature, rigor mortis, insect activity, and decomposition. Individually, many of these indicators are prone to inaccuracy due to the influence of the external environment upon them. This study proposed that in addition to or in conjunction with these and other indicators, certain enzymes could be used to accurately determine PMI, namely aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), creatine kinase (CK), and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH). In this project, 18 rats were studied postmortem to determine how ethanol consumption and different environments affect decomposition and enzyme activity. Three groups of six rats each were studied at three different times. Two rats in each group of six received Treatment 1 (0 mg/dL ethanol), two received Treatment 2 (75 mg/dL ethanol), and two received Treatment 3 (200 mg/dL ethanol). One hour after treatments were given, the rats were euthanized in a CO₂ chamber. After euthanasia one rat from each treatment pair was put into a cold room (approximately 40° F) and the other was put outside. Liver tissue, cardiac muscle, and skeletal muscle samples were taken periodically and frozen at -80° C. Samples were homogenized and centrifuged at 12x g for one hour and put back into -80° C until analysis on the spectrophotometer. After this analysis, the data were compiled using the SAS/IML version 9.1 program. Graphs for each enzyme and tissue type were made, illustrating the positions of all data points in relation to the prediction interval deduced from the statistical computations. Visually and statistically, the graphs did not seem to exhibit any discernible pattern with regard to enzyme velocity. Alcohol did not appear to affect the enzyme activity. This study did not find a pattern for using enzyme velocity to determine PMI. Further research projects could attempt to study other variables not considered in this project. Studies using larger animals, different environments, and different taphonomic conditions would all be projects that could enhance this subfield of forensics.

Hydrogen and the Hydrogen Economy are increasingly becoming buzzwords in discussions regarding future U.S. energy scenarios. Hydrogen energy offers a multitude of economic and environmental advantages over the current world energy structure. Despite this attention, there have been very few geographical studies of a possible transition to a hydrogen system. Even these studies have been limited in scope to demand-side analyses. This thesis attempts to rectify this situation by broadening the scope of geographical studies of hydrogen through the analysis of supply-side scenario. This study is a site selection model for a biomass hydrogen facility in the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana. In this analysis, several existing biomass production facilities in Louisiana were analyzed against existing market demand locations throughout the Gulf Coast region. Though none of these locations proved profitable in this analysis, this model will hopefully serve as a basis for future supply-side hydrogen studies, as well as, provide impetus toward further discussion of renewable hydrogen energy.

Recent geographic research on public space focuses largely on either the past or present. Using historical and ethnographic methods, I contribute to understanding public space over time from an everyday point of view, a variety of social scales. Further, departing from a generally political-protest focus that much geographic literature centers on, my study explores the multifaceted areas of the political, cultural, and economic in public space. Thus, I show that the need for public space expands beyond protest voices into other realms that form and inform identity. Through New Orleans Jackson Square, these prospects of public space demonstrate a world of its own that connects with and to other social worlds. Specifically, my research reveals ongoing and often mutually constitutive tensions between representation and practice, which various groups and classes employ in the meaning making of public space. In doing so, I engage with one of cultural geographys current and important debates over the significance of and between representation and practice. I argue that approaches to creating cultural geographies must include examining both representation and practice together and on a continuum, where both are mutually constitutive of each other and thus to understanding the meanings of landscape and place.

This research examines the contemporary practice of midwifery in Louisiana, a state that very early on had progressive legislation, yet remains a tough place for a midwife to practice. What, then, are the social forces that affect the ability to practice midwifery in Louisiana? I try to answer that question by examining the narratives of midwives and their clients, and evaluating the options these women have access to in this state. The narratives provide opportunities to observe the authoritarian knowledge of biomedicine in our society, and apply Foucaults theory of power/knowledge. I describe that although Louisianas regulation of the practice was progressive when written, the regulation alone cannot guarantee access to midwifery. I also deconstruct the meaning of choice, a phenomenon that involves not merely the existence of alternatives, but real ways of accessing them equally. Efforts to employ midwives and have a home birth are often thwarted by biomedicine, law, private insurance, and Medicaid. Additionally, the social sanctions against midwifery clients can be painful. This research demonstrates that an out-of-hospital birth, while legal, is not easily available or practiced by women in Louisiana. Using anthropological skills to understand the complexity of choice for midwives and their clients in Louisiana also offers me the opportunity to consider how the social forces shaping that choice might better work with midwifery. Working as an applied anthropologist provides the chance to engage in change with the community. Making this research available to women who consider this choice or have already struggled to make it is a first and crucial step in that engagement.

Before the rise of clinical medicine, Western medicine was undergoing several prerequisite shifts in epistemology and methodology - moving from an eighteenth-century practice of spaces and classes, wherein the symptom is synonymous with the disease, toward a nineteenth-century science of signs and cases, in which symptoms are symbols, or products, of a deeper disease (Foucault 1973). During the former age of classes, about mid-century, a particular shift in the medical perception of sex differences appears in the literature, without any great advances or revisions in human anatomical knowledge or treatment methods. This thesis looks at hospitalization of in-patients at Pennsylvania Hospital spanning 50 years during which this shift in medical body concept took hold in European medicine, and was transmitted to American medical students educated in England and Edinburgh. A correlated change in medical practice is expected after major changes in either medical knowledge or in medical body concept occur. Generally, no significant difference is found in the records of the kind of treatment administered or length of hospitalization of in-patients during the time period analyzed. However, women did experience longer hospitalization for most diagnostic categories. A correlation exists between men hospitalized for increasingly longer periods while a much higher proportion (by 45 percent) of pay patients to poor patients were being admitted after 1783. More research on pay and poor patient demographics is needed before a conclusion on this point may be drawn. This thesis suggests that the lived patient experience may not reflect the image presented by contemporary medical literature. The patient records do appear to indicate that a contrastive view of anatomical sex differences was influencing lengths of hospitalization between men and women. This difference is most visible among lunacy cases, in which the author shows patient autonomy is reduced while the physician's power is inversely increased, and thus the medical body concept more strongly affects the course of treatment. Future research at Pennsylvania Hospital may need to extend into the nineteenth century when hospital records begin to include more complete and detailed information about individual cases. Similar studies at other contemporary hospitals in America and Western Europe may also shed light on the links between patient experience and medical practice advocated in literature.

The corset in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe was not merely an article of clothing. The corset was a complex and often contradictory social and cultural symbol. It symbolized both the sensual female body and the chaste virgin; the female control over male desires, and the males control over the female body. The ubiquity of the corset in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe is an important commentary on historical European society. Reports of women (and men) who have died as a result of the tightness of their corsets abound in the literature. Case studies from medical professionals provide information on the changes corsets wrought in the soft tissues of the women who wore them. However, to date, no systematic studies have been conducted which detail the changes in the bony pelvis. This study examines the effect of corseting upon the female and male pelvis of the Spitalfields skeletal collection, with consideration of consequential reduced fecundity and difficulties in parturition. Corseting status was determined through the presence or absence of compression on the ribs. Results show arcurate line length was significantly shorter in females with deformed ribs than in females with normal ribs, and the females with deformed ribs were significantly younger than the normal rib females. In addition, transverse diameter of the inlet and maximum femoral length approached significance, with females having deformed ribs being smaller. There was no significant relationship between pelvic contraction and deformed ribs, and deformed rib females retained a significantly larger pelvis than normal rib males. These data indicate that corseting did change the average size of the female pelvis, but not sufficiently to change the obstetrical sufficiency of the corseted pelvis.

Large psychiatric hospitals with inpatients interned for decades are still the norm in Argentina, where deinstitutionalization and community-based mental health care is almost inexistent. This thesis focuses on some changes taking place in a centenary psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires province: the externación of long-term psychiatric patients through new programs planned and run from inside the institution by health professionals compromised in making a change in the old asylum. Can long-term inpatients with serious mental illness such as schizophrenia leave the asylum and integrate in the society having a recovered life? Do the new externación programs make this possible? What is the place of the psychiatric hospital in the process of externación? are some of the questions raised in this research. Through an ethnographic methodology it describes the ex-patients' experiences of life inside the institution, going through the externación process, and living outside in the community. These experiences provide insider perspectives to analyze the new programs and also the place of the psychiatric hospital in ex-patients' lives in the community. The literature on deinstitutionalization in the United States usually describes the lives of ex-patients in the community as lonely, isolated, empty, and lacked of socially valued roles and productive activities. The findings of this research, instead, describe ex-patients lives as involved in an informal economy for coping with a context of poverty and scarcity of social security programs and official policies for deinstitutionalization. Ex-patients construct survival strategies and social networks and participate in the "outside world" of the community integrating aspects of the "psychiatric world" of the hospital, which they have constructed as a multiple resource, and making meaningless the supposed need of separating these worlds.