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The following is a case study of the University of New Orleans Disaster Resistant University project. The Disaster Resistant University project involved the creation, adoption, and implementation of an all-hazards campus mitigation plan. On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina struck the City of New Orleans. This disaster caused the need for a reassessment of the original campus mitigation plan. Both the original plan, and its reassessment, are the subject of this case study.

This study examines the phenomenon of student resiliency as it relates to Nunez Community College students who returned to attend school in the community of St. Bernard Parish following Hurricane Katrina. Nunez Community College is located in Chalmette, Louisiana, fifteen miles east of the City of New Orleans. The community is adjacent to the Lower Ninth Ward. This study seeks to answer the questions of why the students returned to a disaster-stricken area to continue their studies and how the students coped in the aftermath. There is a significant gap in the literature on post-disaster resiliency and in particular, the role of education in post-disaster recovery. Twelve students who returned to Nunez Community College post-Katrina were interviewed using a Student Resilience Model as a conceptual framework. The perceptions of the students' post-disaster experiences resulted in five themes which included Individual Resilience, Post-Disaster Academic Integration, Post-Disaster Social Int

The purpose of this research is to analyze the dynamic processes of collective identity by examining the relationship between New Orleans and its professional football team, the Saints, after Hurricane Katrina. Much of the discourse written on American professional sports focuses on economic transactions between player and franchise or franchise and city. This study explores sports from a cultural perspective to understand the perceived social values provided to the host community. This case study spans the years from 2006 to 2013 and discusses several major events, including the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the reopening of the Superdome, the Saints winning a league championship and subsequent cheating scandal, and the city’s hosting of Super Bowl XLVII. Using a mixed-method approach of content analysis, in-person interviews, and participant observation, this research demonstrates how post-Hurricane Katrina events altered the collective identity in New Orleans. Additionally, it explores how the interaction of sports, identity, and ritual served to create a civic religion in New Orleans. Finally, the research examines the impact of this religious devotion on New Orleans’ tourist economy.

Despite a century of educational reforms, no matter how achievement is measured, learning and opportunity gaps can still be predicted by race and socioeconomic status. Teachers and schools are blamed for functioning to reproduce social inequality. This study investigated teacher agency and transformative potentials. It considered how teachers modified their pedagogical practices when teaching low-income and high-poverty students. In order to capture teacher beliefs and logic, a qualitative approach was used involving in-depth interviews of a small number of participants. The research used the context of the dislocation of students from high-poverty Orleans Parish schools in the year following Hurricane Katrina and their absorption into often higher income schools to understand middle-class teachers’ perspectives on their new students’ learning needs and how they adjusted their practice. Participants were middle-school mathematics teachers ranging in experience and orientation. Evacuees had weaker mathematics backgrounds (often two years below grade level). In all cases, evacuees were in classes with non-evacuees. Teachers made different pedagogical choices: continuing to use diverse methods aimed at higher-order understanding, or moving to direct instructional strategies; remediating or accelerating students with below-grade-level mathematics skills; and whether or not to help students acculturate (code-switch) from one set of classroom norms and etiquettes to another. Key factors influencing choices included: socioeconomic makeup of their classes; teachers’ level of mathematics expertise; emphasis on test scores; teachers’ views of students’ culture; and teachers’ peer environments. The study provides insights into teacher and classroom mechanisms that contributed to Katrina evacuee multi-year achievement gains.

On Monday August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Southeast Louisiana bringing with it destruction to much of the Gulf Coast. While New Orleans, one of America's most culturally and artistically significant cities, was spared a direct hit, the subsequent flood devastated much of the city, home to many musicians. The devastation and stress from the storm established a situation and a motivator for creative response, and this dissertation illustrates that the music these musicians produce is a manifestation and continuation of New Orleans' cultural atmosphere. The city's historical allowance and celebration of freedom of expression permits New Orleans' current musicians to be innovative and responsive to the events surrounding the disaster. This project, designed as a qualitative research study, identifies four professional musicians who are established in the musical environment of New Orleans. To illustrate the depth of tradition and experimentation that their music evokes, the music of post- Katrina New Orleans is given historical contextualization and set in comparison to music that was inspired by a past catastrophe, the 1927 flood. Through the holistic exploration of the present circumstances of these four musicians, it becomes clear that New Orleans remains a place that is extremely open to change and that experimental music flourishes at the same time that traditional jazz lives on through new performers, who walk in the footsteps of legends. From interviews conducted with these four individuals, as well as other on-site observations, the emotional, physical, and financial effects of Hurricane Katrina are identified and recorded. / Central to this study is the author's own knowledge of music and experience in musical dialogue - it is through the interaction of the author and the subjects that important events and characteristics, which could be documented, actually emerged.This project reveals the influence that the storm has had on the individual musician and it demonstrates that while all four musicians are caught up in the whirlwind of recovery in New Orleans, their music remains rooted in the fundamental characteristic that is associated historically with New Orleans' music, improvisation. By the same token, it also shows that while each person may have had to suffer the same conditions, the musical response from each musician was unique. / by David Bethea. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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