Fall 2025 Katrina@20 Symposium – Recoveries, Resistances, and Remembrances: An Environmental Justice and Public Humanities Symposium on the 20th Anniversary of Flooding of New Orleans

Katrina@20 Symposium, October 22-24, 2025

Katrina@20 has been sponsored by the Georgetown Humanities Initiative via a collaboration grant and by the Earth Commons. The symposium will feature a range of events at both of Georgetown’s D.C. campuses.

Katrina@20 will examine aspects of the legacies and implications of the flood.  Through a focus on Environmental Justice, we will consider how the impacts of Katrina were disproportional, based on class, race, and status. As the wetlands in Louisiana disappear at an ever-increasing rate, climate change produces rising sea levels, higher temperatures, and greater precarity, especially for working class Black citizens.  Dr. Beverly Wright, founder of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, will deliver the keynote address on Thursday, October 23rd, at 7 PM on the Capitol Campus (the McCourt School Auditorium, 125 E. Street NW).

Through the lens of the Public Humanities, we will seek to understand the causes and consequences of Katrina through interdisciplinary inquiry and discussion. We will convene a gathering of key voices to seek to better understand what happened, what changed, what we remember, what we have forgotten, and what we must do about it all.  On October 22, we will host a film screening of the film, Guardians of the Flame (2025), at 7 PM, on both campuses (in the Film Screening Classroom on the Hilltop and in the new 111 Mass building on the Capitol Campus).

After Katrina, New Orleans became a less diverse, more white City. Rebuilding and restoration were uneven, with some neighborhoods springing back and others remaining devastated. Property values rose due to speculation and the influx of part-time residents who turned properties into short-term rentals via digital platforms. With increases in the cost of living, many life-long residents were priced out of neighborhoods including the Marigny, the Bywater, and Treme. Gentrification and speculation changed New Orleans, extending the impacts of the flooding itself.

In response, many communities reinvested in long-standing institutions, including Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, Mardi Gras Indian Tribes, and Benevolent Societies (such as Black Men of Labor). Forms of culture, including making music, creating visual art, growing and cooking food, and parading in the streets worked against the commodification and the homogenization of New Orleans in the two decades since Katrina and the Flood. Non-profit groups formed community gardens and used urban agriculture to produce healthy food and to train community members.  Other activists have intervened via new strategies including forming land trusts and developing community political capital.

On Friday, October 24, we will host two panel sessions in the HFSC Social Room (on the Hilltop Campus).  The first panel will focus on culture, art, music, and performance and will feature NEA Jazz Master and Mardi Gras Indian Chief Donald Harrison Jr.; artist, curator, educator, and Mardi Gras Indian Queen Cherice Harrison-Nelson; and Georgetown faculty members Bernie Cook (American Studies, Film & Media Studies) and Anita Gonzalez (Racial Justice Initiative, Theater & Performance Studies, Black Studies).  The second panel will focus on community-based activism via land use and urban cultivation and will feature artist, theorist, and activist Shana Griffin; activist, community organizer, and computer animator Jengo Mwendo; environmental justice activist Arthur Johnson; and Georgetown faculty member Yuki Kato (Sociology, Earth Commons).

In between the panel sessions, Donald Harrison Jr. will perform with his combo as part of the Music Program’s Friday Music Series (12:30-1:45 PM in McNeir Auditorium).