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A People's Guide

A popular geography project that aims to build spatial understandings of power.

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New Orleans

A People’s Guide to New Orleans maps a new racial geography of the city, one not recognized in the tourist landscape.

This mandates emphasizing historical periods that prevailing guidebooks to the city do not address, highlighting the experiences and affiliated sites of different racial and ethnic groups, and reinterpreting existing tourist sites to better reflect a diversity of perspectives and conflicts over history and memory. In particular, this guide highlights the ways that the city’s racial geography has been produced by historical patterns of environmental racism, gentrification, mass incarceration, residential segregation, police brutality, and educational, economic, and healthcare disparities that make New Orleans a separate and unequal city.

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Both before and in the years since Katrina, grassroots activists from a range of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds in New Orleans as well as local artists, cultural leaders, and scholars have labored to change this geography. A People’s Guide to New Orleans synthesizes, maps, and adds new research to their work in order to offer students, scholars, local readers, and tourists the chance to learn and live out the city’s history from the perspective of workers, movement leaders, and the makers of the city’s vibrant cultures of resistance.

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Contributors

Lynnell L. Thomas

New Orleans

Lynnell L. Thomas is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Elizabeth Steeby

New Orleans

Elizabeth Steeby is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Orleans.

Selected Sites

Visual Portfolio, Posts & Image Gallery for WordPress

Chinatown

Civic Theatre

McDonogh 35 College Preparatory High School

Old Spanish Fort

William Frantz Elementary School

Sam Bonart Playground

New Basin Canal Park

Café Lafitte in Exile

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Resources

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Blog

People’s Guide Website Begins Beta Testing

March 19, 2021

On Friday the People’s Guide Website will begin limited beta testing leading up to launch…

A People’s Guide Goes Live

March 19, 2021

After many years, the first version of A People’s Guide is visible to the public!…

A People's Guide to Los Angeles

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