As the symbolic and functional heart of the New Orleans tourism industry, the French Quarter has been described as the city's "number one factory". Using this evocative image as a starting point, this paper explores workaday life within this factory. I argue that the political economy of tourism brings together the world of work and the world of leisure in such a way that neither can be meaningfully understood apart from each other. To get at this point, I examine the commodity which at the heart of the tourist economy, which, I contend, is the touristic experience. Drawing on data gleaned from interviews, participant observation, and analysis of tourist discourse, I show that the production of this commodity – immaterial as it may appear – is in fact quite labor intensive. Furthermore, as tourism has become the driving sector of the New Orleans economy, the social and economic arrangements that the industry entails have extended out from the factory, integrating a broader swath of the city's geography into its structure than is generally supposed.

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I argue that to understand the gender dynamics of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, and the storm's aftermath, one must interrogate the cultural conflation of the black female body and the city's legacy to explore what it means and how it situates real black women in social, cultural, and physical landscapes. Using a hybrid theoretical framework informed by Black feminist theory, ecocriticism, critical race feminism, and post-positivist realism, I explore the connections between New Orleans' cultural and historical discourses that gender the city as feminine, more specifically as a black woman or Jezebel, with narratives of real black females to illustrate the impact that dominant discourses have on people's lives. I ground this work in Black feminism, specifically Hortense Spillers's and Patricia Hill Collins's works that center the black female body to garner a fuller understanding of social systems, Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality, and Evelyn Hammonds's call for a reclamation of the body to interrogate the ideologies that inscribe black women. In addition, I argue that black women should reclaim New Orleans' metaphorical black body and interrogate this history to move forward in rebuilding the city. As an ecocritic and feminist, I understand the tension involved with reading a city as feminine and arguing for this reclamation, as this echoes colonial and imperialist discourses of conquering land and bodies, but I negotiate these tensions by specifically examining the discourse itself to expose the sexist and racist ideologies at work. / Master of Arts

The following thesis examines the development of the Louisiana Superdome from a concept that created division amongst the people of Louisiana, including those in the New Orleans metropolitan area, to a facility that would serve as, "a symbol of our recovery". This thesis begins with the fanfare and euphoria from the reopening of the Superdome in September 2006 following millions of dollars worth of damage from Hurricane Katrina and from those using it as a "shelter of last resort". It then introduces some of the major players in the Superdome's development from a divisive concept into a symbol of the community. This thesis examines the factors in the evolution of the meaning of the Superdome for those in the surrounding communities. The factors include political ideology, economic conditions, race relations, and entertainment.

The high number of working parents in the U.S. means that there are millions of child in need to care during working hours. Research shows that the quality of this care is of high importance in a child's development, both in the short-term and the long-term. States have used a variety of policy tools to regulate child care and to attempt to improve the quality of care. Louisiana has recently implemented a new policy called the Quality Rating System. Directors of centers in Orleans Parish, Louisiana, were interviewed to determine the impact of participation in QRS. Centers are struggling to meet the requirements and feel that changes need to be made for the program to have a better outcome.

Im Jahre 2005 verzeichnete New Orleans mit dem Wirbelsturm Katrina eine der folgenreichsten Naturkatastrophen seiner Geschichte, bei der sich auch die Unzulänglichkeit einiger Hochwasserschutzvorkehrungen gezeigt hat. Es waren zahlreiche Tote zu beklagen und die materiellen Schäden waren unübersehbar. Nach dem Ereignis wurde der Hochwasserschutz weiträumig und aufwändig verbessert. Der nachfolgende Beitrag gibt eine Übersicht über den derzeitigen Stand.

Gun violence in New Orleans has grown exponentially over the years. As a society we often forget to reflect on how gun violence effects the youth in our communities. Local members of the community in New Orleans have decided to come together to form organizations that can produce better outcomes for the youth in the New Orleans area, two of those organizations being Son of A Saint and the Youth Empowerment Project. Both of these organizations have started the journey to decreasing the amount of gun violence in the city.

Master of Architecture