"Civic engagement has been underrated and overlooked. Koritz and Sanchez illuminate the power of what community engagement through art and culture revitalization can do to give voice to the voiceless and a sense of being to those displaced." ---Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, Wesleyan University

"This profound and eloquent collection describes and assesses the new coalitions bringing a city back to life. It's a powerful call to expand our notions of culture, social justice, and engaged scholarship. I'd put this on my 'must read' list." ---Nancy Cantor, Syracuse University

This collection of essays documents the ways in which educational institutions and the arts community responded to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. While firmly rooted in concrete projects, Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina also addresses the larger issues raised by committed public scholarship.

How can higher education institutions engage with their surrounding communities? What are the pros and cons of "asset-based" and "outreach" models of civic engagement? Is it appropriate for the private sector to play a direct role in promoting civic engagement? How does public scholarship impact traditional standards of academic evaluation? Throughout the volume, this diverse collection of essays paints a remarkably consistent and persuasive account of arts-based initiatives' ability to foster social and civic renewal.

Read Online: Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina

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INTRODUCTION
On August 29, 2005, the city of New Orleans  and the surrounding Gulf Coast region was hit by a monstrous hurricane named Katrina, which exposed the underlying racial and economic inequalities and public corruption that mark so many cities in the United States at the beginning of the Page  2twenty-first century. Over the next few days, as the rest of the United States and the world witnessed the lack of adequate planning and preparation, which left thousands of residents to struggle for their very survival in the wake of Katrina, residents of New Orleans realized that they had experienced one of the most catastrophic failures of public investment that had ever been perpetrated on a resident citizen population in the history of the United States.

Now, three years past those tragic days at the end of the summer of 2005, it is clear that the U.S. federal government and local state, parish, and city governments still have not provided the economic and social support necessary to reconstruct New Orleans to any semblance of what it once was. Yet with 70 percent of its prestorm population now in the city, those individuals who today call New Orleans home continue to hope for support in rebuilding the homes, lives, and institutions necessary for the “Big Easy” to once again become a beacon of distinctive culture and resounding fortitude.

By focusing on individuals and organizations involved in civic engagement work, this volume offers a window into one aspect of this recovery. Civic engagement work before Hurricane Katrina was not easy given the broad structural inequalities and palpable history of racism and political corruption in the region. In 2004, Louisiana had the second-highest rate of poverty in the nation and the fifth-lowest rate of median household income, with almost 37 percent of its black residents considered impoverished. 

The flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina and the breaks in the city’s levees not only exposed residents in various neighborhoods to potential death and destruction; it also decimated neighborhoods in the long term, leading between 30 and 40 percent of the city’s population to seek permanent or semipermanent exile in other cities. Some civic engagement projects stopped in the wake of Katrina because the very neighborhoods where engagement took place had disappeared. ...

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Amy Koritz is Director of the Center for Civic Engagement and Professor of English at Drew University.

Front and rear cover designs, photographs, and satellite imagery processing by Richard Campanella.

ABOUT DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS
digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

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