Environmental Studies 497 - Hurricane Katrina

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, crippling the city of New Orleans and ultimately killing 1,833 people. The scale of human suffering was widely covered by print and television media. This national tragedy focused attention on racial and class divides and the incompetency and neglect of government before, during, and after the storm. But, despite its impacts, Hurricane Katrina has slowly faded from our collective memory. In this course we will examine the event of Hurricane Katrina—its causes, its detailed unfolding, its national significance, and its effects—as well as use Hurricane Katrina as a lens through which to analyze the workings of structures of discrimination endemic to life in the United States. We begin the course by setting this disaster in historical and ecological context. We will explore the development of Mississippi River Delta, the social, cultural, and racial history of New Orleans and Southern Louisiana, and economic development in the region over the twentieth century. We will focus on the histories of exploitative land use and social discrimination that created the vulnerabilities laid bare by Katrina. In the second section of the course, we examine the storm and the immediate aftermath through reporting, firsthand accounts, and documentaries, attending to the ways in which the impacts of the storm were borne unequally. We will interrogate the narrative of Katrina as a “natural” disaster and examine how patterns of vulnerability were predetermined by the racial and class history of Southern Louisiana. For the remainder of the course, we will read scholarly analyses of Katrina, its aftermath, and the recovery effort in order to situate the disaster in a broader social context. We will also examine how the hurricane transformed New Orleans and the ways in which the recovery has and has not fulfilled its promises. We close the course with a discussion of the BP oil spill and the climate justice movement in Southern Louisiana.

Requisite: Not open to first-year students. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Hejny.