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The following paper proposes "A Subject-Centered Ethnography" as a way to address some of the personal and political dilemmas that face the ethnographer in their work, particularly work that is researching politics and dealing with dynamic power relations. There are three "R's" associated this kind of ethnography: reflexivity, relationships, and representation. I explore what each of these means looking at ways in which other ethnographers have defined these rather nebulous terms. With each of the three moments there exists a dilemma, with the reflexive moment there is the possible existential dilemma, with relationships there is the interpersonal dilemma, and finally, with representation, there is the political dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the struggle to reopen public housing in Post- Katrina New Orleans. It focuses on the tension between the techniques of exclusion, pushed by the local redevelopment groups, local officials, politicians, and the tactics of inclusion, whereby former residents and their allies fought to reopen the shuttered homes. After a short introduction, the paper spends some time giving the historical context of public housing in New Orleans as well as the broad national efforts for redevelopment that began in the 90s. It then moves on to ethnographically situate this struggle. In particular, the struggle between exclusion and inclusion is seen as a much larger political response to the "spatial fixing of poverty" on the part of marginalized members of a community. Such that the struggle is less about a social provision and more about reclaiming a visible space in the political sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of engineering firms in urban areas have been slowly transforming what politics are and how they are performed. The language and logics of engineering and planning-like economics has had for social and political life-have become inserted into space and politics in unexplored ways. Using ethnographic data from public meetings in New Orleans between 2010-2011, as well as archival research on firms, I begin to connect how these rational forms of planning and building may actually be transforming political life, challenging us to rethink what representation means in this new context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the political struggle around the closing of public housing in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Taking a long look at the rebuilding of the city in the years since the storm the paper suggests that ruptures caused by disasters (both natural and social) cleave along old divisions that are rarely remade (as some would like to believe) in the post-disaster landscape. The struggle around public housing discursively drew upon old beliefs of who the residents were and those in power utilized familiar techniques of repression and exclusion in the hopes of remaking the low-income housing landscape, I refer to these as the "techniques of liminality". Former residents and their allies responded to the stain of the stigma in multiple ways, which I refer to as "tactics of inclusion". Based on over 18 months of ethnographic work in the city from February 2010-August 2011, the paper gives an in-depth portrayal of the process of urban politics that has rarely been shown in the years since Hurricane Katrina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a descriptive piece about the social, cultural, and economic implications of tourism on a local barrio in Havana, Cuba. It is taken from two summer ethnographic fieldwork in a barrio located within Havana, Cuba. To organize my paper, I use four images to speak of how tourism in Cuba shows that tourism is not merely a phenomenon to be discussed within the framework of globalization but that tourism in effect replicates the colonialist narrative. The four images/types underscore the themes of work, race, the commodification of culture, and a return to colonialist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical framework based on work of citizenship and urban struggles around housing. It situates this in the variety of housing struggles that emerged in post-Katrina New Orleans. In particular it asks the question of whether or not the different forms of housing (private, public, house-less) may inform the nature of the claims made and the forms of the struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]