Thesis (PH. D.)--Louisiana State University, 1963. / Vita. Includes abstract.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis examines the environmental and social consequences of maintaining the artificial divide between thinking and feeling, mind and matter, logos and eros. New Orleans, a city where the natural environment and human sensuality are both dominant forces, is used as a case study to explore the implications of our attempts to impose rational controls on nature - both physical and human nature. An analysis of New Orleans leading up to and immediately following Hurricane Katrina (2005) reveals that the root of the trouble in the city is not primarily environmental, technological, political, or sociological, but philosophical: there is something amiss in the relationship between human rationality and the corporeal world. I argue that policy decisions which do not include the contributions of experts from the humanities and qualitative social sciences - persons with expertise on human emotions, intentions, priorities and desires - will continue to be severely compromised.

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

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

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.

Guided and influenced by a famous follow-up study in criminology focused on desistance from crime, this dissertation studies desistance from crime, homelessness, and substance abuse. In the early 1990s, The New Orleans Homeless Substance Abusers Project (NOHSAP) was founded as an experiment funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) to uncover optimal treatment strategies for homeless alcoholics and drug addicts. The program ran for three years (1991-1993) and in those years, 670 homeless New Orleans men and women were admitted into treatment. Some of the original clients were followed for as long as 18 months, but none of them had been re-contacted since the mid-1990s. This dissertation involves finding these individuals and re-interviewing them, to discover what life trajectories they have taken some 17-19 years later. Guided by social bonding theory, this project shows what baseline factors and conditions explain variability in life outcomes. The methodology for this study consists of three main parts: 1) a quantitative analysis of mortality data; 2) a historical analysis of criminal histories and 3) in-depth interviews. Nested logistic regression models explained differences among those who have died (n = 91) and those still living. The same method was used to explain differences among those currently incarcerated (n = 56). Follow-up interviews were conducted with 32 individuals in a variety of settings including at their homes and in prisons. Findings from the quantitative results show that social bonding theory seems to be a weak explanation scheme among this population. Results from the qualitative data, however, are contrary and show social bonds to be crucial in the desistance process. Like Laub and Sampson’s study, marriage and employment were strong predictors of desistance. Individuals iv interviewed tended to be sober, but disaffiliated with twelve-step meetings. Other themes from the interviews involve presentation of self, the importance of religion, and a process of aging out of crime. Policy implications from these results focus on the importance of choosing a good life partner, the reduction of alcohol and drug use among abusers, and emphasizing stable employment.

This memoir is about community, family and race relations as the author experiences them in New Jersey, where she grew up, at University of Maryland, where she went to college, in Washington, D.C., during Barack Obama’s presidency, and in New Orleans, where she lands in her late twenties. It is meant to shed light on the possibilities and beauty to be found in diverse, close-knit communities, where people share in each other’s joys and sorrows. It also speaks to the importance of romantic partnerships in which both people share the same values, and explore and grow together.