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Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans: Discursive Spaces of Safety and Resulting Environmental Injustice

Shears, Andrew B.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1311009183

Abstract Details

2011, PHD, Kent State University, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Geography.
On August 29, 2005, a large tropical cyclone, named Hurricane Katrina, made landfall on the Gulf Coast of the United States. Despite following a track that mostly missed New Orleans, Katrina drowned this city by causing the failure of a protective levee infrastructure that surrounded population portions of the metropolitan area. In this majority African-American city, with a large number of impoverished people, Katrina caused over 900 deaths, tens of thousands of injuries, and left hundreds of thousands of residents displaced. However, the injustices of Katrina can be traced to the founding of New Orleans in 1718, when various government entities worked to alter the city's hazardous natural environment to promote development, beginning with French prison labor in the colony's earliest days, maintaining through a period of Spanish rule, and continuing to contemporary times under the administration of the United States. Indeed, the various infrastructural improvements serve as a discourse of safety, promoting capitalist development and residential settlement of a risky place. By the time Katrina struck, most of these residents, who took these discourses of safety very seriously, were generally of socioeconomically oppressed classes and least able to endure the consequences of that discourse's broken promise.
James Tyner, PhD (Advisor)
Mandy Munro-Stasiuk, PhD (Committee Member)
Scott Sheridan, PhD (Committee Member)
Robert Schwartz, PhD (Committee Member)
298 p.
American History; American Studies; Area Planning and Development; Civil Engineering; Earth; Environmental Economics; Environmental Engineering; Environmental Justice; Environmental Studies; Geography; History; Land Use Planning; Modern History; Physical Geography; Pol
infrastructure; Hurricane Katrina; New Orleans; levees; flooding; environmental justice; hurricane; urban; mitigation; natural hazards; disaster

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Shears, A. B. (2011). Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans: Discursive Spaces of Safety and Resulting Environmental Injustice [Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1311009183

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Shears, Andrew. Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans: Discursive Spaces of Safety and Resulting Environmental Injustice. 2011. Kent State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1311009183.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Shears, Andrew. "Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans: Discursive Spaces of Safety and Resulting Environmental Injustice." Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1311009183

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

kent1311009183
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© 2011, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Kent State University and OhioLINK.