Disneyomatics: Media, Branding, and Urban Space in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Following the events of Hurricane Katrina, the Walt Disney Company took on New Orleans as a special philanthropic project. For many citizens of New Orleans, Disney\u27s active role and its consequent partnership with the city is highly problematic, as evidenced by a spate of newspaper articles after Katrina that expressed fears about the rebuilding leading to the potential Disneyfication of the city. Citizens fear Disney will turn the city into something like Times Square-a space emptied of its former meanings and histories and rearticulated to Disney\u27s sanitized family brand, marked by racial, class, and sexual exclusions. Thus, in New Orleans, critics fear Disney\u27s potential to render the city, which already relies primarily on tourism as its main economic generator, into a whitewashed image of a Disney theme park . At a time when the images from Hurricane Katrina of floating dead bodies, mostly those of the city\u27s black and poor, is still burned fresh on the brain, Disneyfying the city appears as a particularly problematic and disturbing possibility. But down in New Orleans, Disney has not bought any real estate designed to imprint its Mickey Mouse value system on those who enter. It hasn\u27t moved into Canal Street or the French Quarter, nor has it offered to take over the now-defunct Jazzland theme park. Instead, Disney presented itself as a good neighbor, offering the city a kind of corporate social welfare to help bring the city back.In what follows, I consider Disney\u27s two most visible charitable acts in New Orleans, what the company characterized as gifts to the city to help them recover : the film, The Princess and the Frog (2009) and Disney\u27s Dreams Come True exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA)

Review of Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina by Vincanne Adams

I recently took a group of students to New Orleans over our spring break for an interdisciplinary class on the relationships between space, culture, and media industries in cities. It was a trip that promised to be both wonderful and terrifying—wonderful in the sense of students living an embodied education of not only the history, politics, and culture of the city, but also of the sights, sounds, smells, and physical encounters that make up those histories, politics, and cultures; yet terrifying in the sense that the students might miss the significance of how these same sounds, sights, smells, and physical encounters speak to histories of inequity, injustice, and struggle that manifest themselves in renewed struggles over privatization, insecurity, and loss in the post-Katrina aftermath. Carrying Vincanne Adams’ book in my bag throughout the trip (as I was toting it around as a reminder of the need to complete this review) felt like more than the weight of the physical pages on my shoulder. The book weighed on me as a responsibility to ensure students understood the significance of what they were witnessing — that the seeds of ‘recovery’ we were seeing in New Orleans were part of what Adams refers to as a ‘second order disaster,’ one that ‘had its own logic and rationales that were nearly as deadly as those that produced the floods in the first place’ (Adams, 2013: 4). So as the students stumbled home from Bourbon or Frenchman Streets in the wee hours of morning, toting daiquiri cups and other signs that they were living the motto of les bon temps rouler, I took up their days trying to drive home the viciousness of neoliberal economics

Using Service-Learning to Teach Threshold Concepts

The course I chose to focus on for the Backwards by Design retreat and for this particular study is Communication 244: Advocacy through Media. This course enjoins students to critically consider how media can be used as a tool to advocate for social and political change, and, especially for social justice. Students engage with scholarly and activist literature on theories of media, social change, and advocacy as well as case studies of media makers who intervene in the process of social change. Students’ critical acumen is sharpened through participating in a service-learning project, where students learn how to apply theories of media advocacy in the practice of working with non-profits invested in social justice issues

KVOS in the Local, Public Interest

In this presentation, Dr. Helen Morgan Parmett examines the ways in which KVOS – Bellingham’s first local radio and television station – helped constitute a sense of “local” identity and culture in the 1930s-1960s, and also the role KVOS played in broader debates over what it means for media to serve the local, public interest. Morgan Parmett’s research on this topic drew extensively on the Rogan Jones papers and KVOS records housed at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies