Leiden University Student Repository

Blumenbach, Elena (2023)

BLACK FEMINIST PRACTICES OF COMMUNITY BUILDING AS A RECLAMATION OF THE RIGHT TO NEW ORLEANS POST-KATRINA

Bachelor thesis | Urban Studies (BA)

This thesis seeks to examine how women in African American communities in the United States form alternative networks of care and use practices of homemaking when that kind of care and protection is not offered by the state in the aftermath of disaster. Practices of homemaking have been used by African American women as spaces of recuperation and political resistance from slavery to the civil rights movement to post-Katrina New Orleans. Furthermore, I ask how this community building creates urban belonging and a right to the city, revolutionizing Lefebvre’s right to the city. The question is how community building functions as a reclamation of New Orleans, a city drowned and transformed, and how the right to return and the right to neighborhood and community plays into that. I thus aim to deepen the understanding of how existing kinship structures in post-disaster communities impact the process of returning to New Orleans, recovering from the storm and rebuilding in its aftermath,...Show moreThis thesis seeks to examine how women in African American communities in the United States form alternative networks of care and use practices of homemaking when that kind of care and protection is not offered by the state in the aftermath of disaster. Practices of homemaking have been used by African American women as spaces of recuperation and political resistance from slavery to the civil rights movement to post-Katrina New Orleans. Furthermore, I ask how this community building creates urban belonging and a right to the city, revolutionizing Lefebvre’s right to the city. The question is how community building functions as a reclamation of New Orleans, a city drowned and transformed, and how the right to return and the right to neighborhood and community plays into that. I thus aim to deepen the understanding of how existing kinship structures in post-disaster communities impact the process of returning to New Orleans, recovering from the storm and rebuilding in its aftermath, when institutional frameworks are lacking.Show less

Feminist cities, Community Building, Right to the City, United States,Disaster Research

Author

Blumenbach, Elena

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Multicultural Cities

Supervisors

Georgios Tsagdis

ECTS Credits

15

Language

en