Everyday Perseverance & Meaningful Toil: Mapping the (In)distinguishable Process of Recovery Post-hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, Louisiana

For nearly a century, anthropological scholarship on disaster has contributed to advancing emergency preparation and management, however examination focusing on survivors’ return and responses in the aftermath of catastrophe, specifically the ways in which residents work to recover—if at all—remains far from comprehensive, especially in urban, post-industrial settings. Following calamity, what remains? What is disturbed? What becomes reconstructed? Who repairs the tattered social fabric or restores the built environment? And how do these processes transpire? These questions summarize the research interests of this dissertation, which examines the place-making practices not of experts or administrators, but, rather, those enacted by (extra) ordinary community members of the Lower Ninth Ward post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Specifically, this investigation of place-making in the aftermath of disaster focuses on four main practices: residents-led tours, civic engagement, community establishments/ businesses, and commemorative events. Although these practices and the places residents’ make through these efforts entail ephemerality, I maintain that this toil is particularly meaningful in distinguishing how survivors confront loss, disorientation, and trauma while simultaneously cultivating healing in their lives, livelihoods, and landscape. The findings of this project include that the multiple and fragmentary practices of residents promote a return to the everyday in Katrina\u27s wake and these commingled ways of operating, reveal the adaptive and empowering response of collective autonomy. People\u27s sense of place is a well-studied theme by scholars from diverse disciplines, yet there is much to learn from analyzing this critical dimension of the human condition within a post-disaster context. In gathering data with both long-established ethnographic techniques (prolonged ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation) and innovative, geographic information systems (GIS), this research makes a distinct contribution to the anthropological knowledge and literature focused on sociocultural and spatiotemporal transformation following disasters. This cross-disciplinary approach serves as a novel means for anthropologists to holistically explore the intertwining dynamics involved when previously familiar aspects of life become significantly disrupted including, but are not limited to: environmental, linguistic, historic, political, spiritual, and symbolic. Consideration of these aspects of the lives of those living in the wake of disaster illuminates complexity of remaking home while legitimizing the desire to return to it – especially urgent matters in this era of global climate change

Building Capacity to Receive: How Four Communities in the U.S. are Preparing for Climate Driven In-Migration

In the U.S. and throughout the globe, the impacts of climate change will cause significant migration both within and between countries. While some communities will confront shrinking populations and a smaller tax base, others will need to prepare to receive these migrants and accommodate resulting population growth. A growing body of work focuses on out-migration and displacement, but there is little understanding and virtually no guidance for what communities on the receiving end should be doing to prepare for it. This paper explores lessons learned and issues raised from case studies of four communities in the U.S. that have begun to experience or anticipate in-migration as an impact of climate change. Buffalo, NY and Cincinnati, OH have been identified as relative havens from the most extreme climate impacts and see climate driven in-migration as a way to breathe new life into otherwise shrinking cities. Orlando, FL and St. Tammany Parish, LA are less buffered from climate extremes and hazards, but have received large numbers of climate driven migrants already due to their relative proximity and connections to even more disaster-prone areas along the coast. Climate driven in-migration can provide opportunities for local growth and economic development—especially for rural areas and cities that have experienced decades of decline—but can also strain local infrastructure and resources. Findings from stakeholder interviews in each of these communities highlight affordable housing shortages, cultural and language barriers to accessing local services, and mental health needs of migrants as some of the challenges that need to be addressed to better prepare for migrants. Even in these communities that have publicly acknowledged in-migration as a current or potential impact of climate change, however, planning for the local impacts of this migration is still in very early stages. Stakeholders identified lack of awareness, lack of data, competition with other local priorities, and the absence of federal funding for receiving communities as primary barriers to local planning and preparation for climate migration. In the face of these barriers, the presence of local champions can help to maintain and expand local attention on this issue, while participation in national peer learning networks can support local progress by providing access to resources and information as well as opportunities to learn with and from other communities. Though this study focuses on experiences and approaches at the local level, greater regional, state, and federal coordination were identified as critical elements in responding to increasing migration and building local capacity to receive.Master of City and Regional Plannin

Informal Disaster Governance in Longyearbyen and South Dominica

Scholars and practitioners are increasingly questioning formal disaster governance (FDG) approaches as being too rigid, slow, and command-and-control driven. Too often, local realities and informal influences are sidelined or ignored to the extent that disaster governance can be harmed through endeavours to impose formal and/or political structures. Efforts to include so-called ‘bottom-up’, local, and/or participatory approaches have not changed the FDG-centred disaster narrative. This study considers the role of informality in disasters, encapsulated here as Informal Disaster Governance (IDG). It theorises IDG and situates it within the long-standing albeit limited literature on the topic, paying particular attention to the literature’s failure to properly define informal disaster risk reduction and response (DRR/R) efforts. Empirically, this study explores IDG in two locations—the settlement of Longyearbyen in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and the southern region of the Commonwealth of Dominica—where IDG might be expected to be more powerful or obvious, namely in smaller, more isolated communities. Fifty-four semi-structured interviews were conducted, visually aided by an innovative use of the PRISM (Pictorial Representation of Illness and Self Measure) tool, to examine residents’ perceptions of disaster risks, and informal sources of disaster-related information and help. The findings suggest that informality plays a significant and complementary role in disasters in both locations and highlight the role of proximity/propinquity, relationships, experience, and power as contributing factors for why people choose informal sources of disaster information and help. Thus, this study conceptualises the drivers and far-reaching implications of IDG but also considers its ‘dark sides’. By presenting IDG as a framework and exploring its merits and challenges, this research restores the conceptual importance and balance of IDG vis-à-vis FDG, paving the way for a better understanding of the ‘complete’ picture of disaster governance

Internet Health Report 2019

This annual report is a call to action to recognize the things that are having an impact on the internet today, and to embrace the notion that we as humans can change how we make money, govern societies, and interact with one another online. We invite you to participate in setting an agenda for how we can work together to create an internet that truly puts people first. This book is neither a country-level index nor a doomsday clock. Our intention is to show that while the worldwide consequences of getting things wrong with the internet could be huge - for peace and security, for political and individual freedoms, for human equality - the problems are never so great that nothing can be done. More people than you imagine are working to make the internet healthier by applying their skills, creativity, and personal bravery to business, technology, activism, policy and regulation, education, and community development

WHEN DARKNESS DESCENDS: A NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF MATERNAL RESILIENCE FOLLOWING HURRICANE MARIA

Within the last 40 years, academic research on disasters has focused on resilience as applied to individual adaptive capacities, rebuilding resources, and policy-driven solutions. While there has been an increased awareness of the many gendered dimensions of post-disaster recovery, women’s and mother’s agency in such situations is still largely ignored. Thus, this dissertation adopts a maternal focus, arguing that mothers are not merely vulnerable subjects but critical agents of post-disaster recovery for families, communities, and social systems more generally. To analyze mothers’ resilience, I looked to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico as an illustrative case and field site. Combined across two site visits in 2019 and 2020, I interviewed nine mothers and conducted a focus group with eight midwives. Their interviews were framed as stories using Clandidin and Connelly’s (2000) restorying techniques. Additionally, I drew from Buzzanell’s (2010) Communication Resilience Framework to map five communicative processes of enacting resilience onto these stories. By studying their stories, I was able to extend Buzzanell’s framework to acknowledge the proactive agency of maternal resilience as enacted through communication, contextual, and relational elements of life in the aftermath. My analysis identifies how mothers reproduced and revised configurations of personal, family, and community life post-disaster. Overall, these embodied research practices revealed how these women remade their daily practices, renegotiated relationships and identities, and created new resource avenues not just to survive but to thrive and live well. When interlinked with histories, material exigencies, and cultural discourses, “getting back to normal” required mothers to seek the routine and advocate for change simultaneously in both motherwork and domesticity. All across the island mothers used anger as a productive force for activism and creative entrepreneurship and leveraged communal coalitions as key components to establishing collaborative empowerment and belongingness. The relationships they had with one another enacted their own brand of resilience. I argue that maternal resilience broadens discussions and understandings of what resilience is and how mothers, through their mothering practices, enact transformative approaches to disaster recovery

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio