The Politics of Visibility: Urban Housing Struggles in Post-Katrina New Orleans

This dissertation compares three housing and land struggles that emerged in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. I analyze the politics that emerge around the closure of public housing, the razing of a neighborhood for a dual-hospital complex, and the attempt to repopulate the predominately Black, working-class Lower Ninth Ward. The dissertation broadly asks: what are the techniques of governance in an era of neoliberalism and how do local actors respond to the physical and political dispossession that comes with these techniques? Using ethnographic research, I uncover the spatial politics of poverty that developed around contested rebuilding and redevelopment policies in an increasingly privatized urban environment.