0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

Civic spaces are designed in the absence of the people they most greatly impact. Conventional engagement efforts consist of formalities such as community meetings that deny participants the agency of hand-making and are built upon relationships of obligation. This runs contrary to a body of research that positions hand-making and solidarity as elemental to human nature: Matthew Crawford equates explorations of “manual engagement” to existential questioning, 1 and Karl Marx saw collaboration as integral to our “species character.” 2 The potential outcomes of this disconnect are undignified spaces that fail to accommodate the most basic human needs. 3 This thesis offers a model of praxis to challenge this disconnect. Nadia Anderson writes that praxis is focused on “process and action” 4 as opposed to products, while Marx characterized praxis as the union of thinking and social practice. 5 Accordingly, this model of praxis is composed of two parts. First, an engagement toolkit implemented in a real community; and second, an architectural proposal developed alongside a partner organization. In New Orleans, the disconnect between users and the creation of civic space is manifested in public transit. The RTA (Regional Transit Authority) bus system converges at a few critical intersections in the city’s Central Business District. Each day, thousands of riders must transfer at these stops, despite a lack of adequate seating, shade, and other basic amenities. 6 Currently, the RTA is conducting a feasibility study for a downtown transit hub. In partnership with Ride New Orleans, a local advocacy group, this thesis will deploy a community engagement toolkit that will enable transit riders to shape the design a dignified transit hub. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

This directed research project explores the benefits of implementing a policy change to allow greywater recycling in New Orleans. Throughout history, New Orleans has had a tenuous relationship with water. Current practices of pumping water both into and out of the city place enormous amounts of strain on the aging water infrastructure system that New Orleans utilizes to keep the city dry and provide potable water to its citizens. The use of greywater recycling systems could dramatically reduce the stress on the city's infrastructure; however this practice is presently prohibited by the city's current plumbing code. This paper presents a case for the adoption of new legislation and changes to the city's policy to allow for greywater recycling. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

specialcollections@tulane.edu / Wheelchair Life: Disability and Black Survival in the Afterlife of Gun Violence is about how gunshot survivors in New Orleans manage their lives and shape their identities after being shot and paralyzed. Following a group of wheelchair users with gunshot induced spinal cord injuries who self-organized into a social network around their devotion to New Orleans parading traditions, this ethnography explores how disability identities are mobilized within the existing stakes of Black survival in the United States. In the racially segregated city of New Orleans, urban gun violence and the wider traumas that are experienced in its aftermath are an immeasurable disruption to Black lives and Black futures. A focus on gun homicides has ignored the life worlds of the injured, particularly those of young Black men, whose experiences are obscured by the legacies and continued violence of anti-Black racism and criminalization of the urban poor, which renders gunshot survivors as guilty or deserving of the violence that happened to them. What does it mean to survive when your survival is a problem both in the sense that you were not expected to survive and your status (as a survivor and a victim) is unacknowledged? “Wheelchair Life” details the varied ways spinal cord injured gunshot survivors contend and contest these realities of social neglect and invisibility, by claiming new forms of mobility and disabled embodiments in public space and forging new modes of caretaking and relationships that enable the “wheelchair life” to be about more than just surviving. / 1 / Daniella Santoro

archives@tulane.edu / 1 / David Cheney

archives@tulane.edu / 1 / David Cheney

No description available.

An organizational analysis of the Christian Woman's Exchange and the Hermann-Grima/Gallier Historic Houses with an emphasis on the organizational structure, organizational history, programmmg, membership, and volunteerism at the organization. Includes an evaluation of organizational goals and objectives, an internship description with an impact analysis, and recommendations for the future.