dialog on New Orleans at IN MEDIA RES

I hope everyone is doing well. I wanted to inform your blog readers about an Internet-facilitated dialog about Katrina, the flooding of New Orleans, and continued political and social issues in the area. We will be posting brief texts and video clips to In Media Res beginning Monday 13 August 2007. In Media Res is a website where media researchers present brief statements and video clips in order to engage with the public about contemporary cultural issues. You can read this material at In Media Res and, more importantly, you can respond to each text. You do need to provide some basic registration information in order to post comments.

This critical engagement relates to ongoing discussions about the ways New Orleans is understood both locally and internationally. Our goal is to engage a larger community in considering what happens to place and site-based identity after it has been produced by the media, how we continue to understand or forget disasters, and the ways political and infrastructural failures may be displaced by narratives about individual “victims” rather than keeping these issues in tension. We also begin to highlight the practices of activists and artists from the area. We hope that you will participate.

The following people will be posting texts and video clips:

Michele White (Monday 13 August)
Betsy Weiss (Tuesday 14 August)
Marline Otte (Wednesday 15 August)
Mark Vail (Thursday 16 August)
Joy Fuqua (Friday 17 August)